Software Architects: A Different Type of Software Practitioner

This paper reports on two studies into the skills required to develop software. In the first, senior software practitioners in four companies, across seven roles were interviewed. However, the architect role proved difficult to characterize, because architects did not seem to carry out any architecture work. It was hypothesized that this was because the five architects interviewed were all working on mature products. In a second study, five senior architects in a single company were interviewed and the realisation from this study is that, unlike most other software practitioners, architects are not so much project focussed as product and market focussed. This discovery suggests that focussing the interviews on projects rather than on products is inappropriate for architects.