I wanted a fancy “about me” slide for a conference, so I used Wordle to create a tag cloud of my current skills. Apart from having to say that Wordle is an amazing piece of software, I look forward to creating another tag cloud in a year to see how it turns out.

I’ve observed an interesting phenomenon lately. The death of design! I’m not sure where it started, but once upon the time there was an activity in the development cycle called design. Simply put this is where the arrangement of components in the system was made.

The distinction between design and architecture is that the outcome of the former does not affect system quality attributes, unless performed really poorly. Of course, design can affect security, maintainability, and most likely performance (to name a few), but in a well-balanced and clearly communicated architecture, this should not be the main problem.

I agree, this argument has several flaws, but the main point is that there is a border not frequently crossed by the average developer (or team). Behind this border you find questions about what to outsource and what not to, what system to build and what system to buy, what infrastructure provider to chose and so on. Again, there are exceptions, but most developers are not involved in these discussions, which are being held in the architecture domain.

I find it difficult to argue about architecture, but I want to make a distinction between choosing between Struts 2 and Spring MVC and deciding what brand the payroll system will have, and what kind of impact its introduction will have on other systems used in the company.

Anyway, this lengthy discussion leads to my observation: In the world of agile methods, self-organizing teams and two-week heartbeats, the design activity is performed continuously and by every developers. Hence, it has lost its meaning. This carries the implication that senior developers, whose decisions affect the design of the system suddenly become architects! After all, calling yourself senior is kind of weak. There has to be a cooler job description.

In the jungle of different definitions of architecture, this just adds to the confusion.

Går ifrån att köra inlägg på svenska till att köra dem på engelska. Då kan man bli flamad av flera . Det kanske dyker upp någonting på svenska i fortsättningen också, men ambitionen är engelska och en tydlig språkseparering i framtiden.