Re: [xml-dev] Re: XML As Fall Guy

[Michael Sokolov <msokolov@safaribooksonline.com>]

On 12/3/2013 8:35 PM, Stephen Cameron wrote:
> Hi Peter, you are lucky 100th posting on this thread.
>
> However what you say is ringing alarm bells for me.
>
> To me using the word 'architecture' is misleading, Frank Lloyd-Wright 
> is one architect that famously never consulted with his clients, he 
> just gave them a design and asked for payment, as a result many of his 
> houses are actually bad to live-in, though visually charming (to me).
>
> In my view, the only 'architecture' in software is the structure that 
> you build into your software, either in terms of your classes using 
> object-oriented programming, the modules in procedural, or the 
> entities of your data-model.
Steve, I share your apprehension, but there is a component of planning 
and building software I think of as architecture that is not business 
analysis.  It relates to layering: some components are more fundamental: 
making changes in those can lead to seismic shifts throughout the 
system, while surface (UI) changes tend to be more isolated.  Certainly 
new user requirements will lead to new data requirements, new fields, 
tags, whatever, but if you decide to change your database system from 
Oracle to MarkLogic (or vice-versa, heresy here I know), that to me is 
an architectural decision.  It may require you to rewrite significant 
portions of your code, or switch in other related components. And these 
decisions can often be made in parallel with - only partially informed 
by - business requirements.  This sort of decision is best made by 
considering technical suitability to the problem, team skills, and 
goodness of fit with existing tools and systems.  Sometimes (often) 
however the decision is driven by business leaders or outside sales 
teams based on dubious grounds.

-Mike

PS
My title is (senior) architect, but I don't do business analyst: in 
sorrier moments I think I got called that because I'm old for a 
programmer, more or less.  I sincerely hope this line of argument is 
motivated by more than mere self-justification!