Musings on the various balls that software architects have to juggle
Have you Used NDepend? I have often wanted to use it, but never spent the money on it. I have developed many tools that try to do pieces of what NDepend does, but never with as much success as they reach. Put simply, it is a tool that will allow you to udnerstand and monitor the architecture of your software, and it does it in some pretty amazing ways. One of the most impressive features is something that they call Code Query Language. It allows you to write queries very similar to SQL to track the ......
Recently I was asked what it is that a software architect does. This is a difficult question to answer. We do so much. For the outsider it can difficult to explain. I started thinking about it in terms of the balls that we juggle. Here is my initial list. I am sure that there are more: Performance Maintainability Security Reliability Scalability Look and Feel Flexibility Best Practices Time lines Politics (Office and Project) Software Version Upgrades Individual egos Scope Creep System Integrity ......