Who needs an archiect?

In this blog entry we are going to talk about an article written by Martin Flowers entitled, “Who needs an architect”, were it talks about software architecture (kind of obvious don’t you think) and the architect's role in a software development team. To be honest, a didn’t get the author’s purpose of the article, but I think I have got the general idea, so I can review this properly.

On the article the author gives many two explanations the software architecture, one of them is quoted by someone else which basically says that a high level concept of a system is only visible (or significant) to developers, now, for me this is really abstract, because I don’t thing it applies to all the projects of this topic, but the second one which is given by the author himself says that the architecture is a a shared understanding of the system design by all of the expert developers involved in the Project, now this makes more sense to me because we can understand that not only the developers knows about the project, but also the other members working on it.

About the role of the architect in a project, the author says that there are to kinds of it, the reloadus and the oryzus. The first kind, the reloadus, is the kind of architect who makes the big calls all by himself, but on the other hand the second kind, the oryzus, is the kind of architect who doesn’t makes the important decisions by himself because it is the one that mentor or tutors the development team so that they can help him to make the decisions.

Now, for me the oryzus is the better kind of architect because is the one that creates a clear way to share the information in regard to the project to all the members, and by doing so it creates a better trust among the team, is like the true team leader in my own opinion.