The Software Architect's Role in the Digital Age

TRADITIONALLY, SOFTWARE architects were entrusted with making “decisions that are costly to change.”1 Because these decisions often had to be made early in the project, architects drew on their experience and ability to abstract to get them right. Repeated project cost and timeline overruns have demonstrated, though, that trying to plan all features and decide the system structure early in a project is difficult at best. This insight, coupled with the increasing demand for delivering high-quality software more quickly, has changed how development teams approach architectural decision making.