design-practice-repository

Role: Application and Integration Architect

also known as: Coding Architect (to indicate strong connection to development)

Persona

Archie Tekt, who first appeared in 2003 in “Perspectives on Web services” by Olaf Zimmermann, Mark Tomlinson, and Stefan Peuser, cares about the structure of and decisions about code packages and configuration artifacts, as well as their dependencies. Development should be productive, the developed software simply and quick to change. It should meet its performance, scalability, and security requirements at runtime. Archie primarily uses the logical and the implementation viewpoints (in the 4+1 view model), but occasionally also gets involved with the scenario viewpoint and the process viewpoint (for instance, in reviews).

Philippe Kruchten has an article “What do software architects really do?” that describes the persona well. But do not forget that architects (like all people) are different!

Olaf Zimmermann’s blog “The Concerned Architect” provides short articles with examples of everyday problems (and solutions to them, including those that made it into DPR already).

Information and Modeling Need

Application architects worry about and need:

Stakeholder concerns, project budgets
Quality attributes
Decision rationale
Quick overviews of external interfaces and internal structure of the produced software and other outcomes of architecture modeling
Dependencies, licenses

Collaborations

API Product Owner/Manager
Developers (who may also take architectural responsibilities)
and many more (all team members and external stakeholders, basically)

Consumed/Produced Artifacts and Applied Practices

Phase	Consumed	Produced	Comments
Analysis	User Stories, Use Cases	Non-functional requirements, for instance in the form of Quality Attribute Scenarios	Iteratively refined
Design	Legacy system descriptions, external interfaces	CRC Cards, Decision log comprising of ADRs (for instance Y-Statements), architecture design models	Both produced and consumed
Implementation and test	Code, test specifications, and reports	Reviews	Not in scope of DPR at present
Evolution and maintenance	Change requests, bug reports	Architectural refactorings	Not in scope of DPR at present

The applied practices include Story Splitting and Strategic Domain-Driven Design.

More Information

See the guest editorial of the special theme issue of IEEE Software “The Role of the Software Architect in the Digital Age” by Gregor Hohpe, Ipek Ozkaya, Uwe Zdun, and Olaf Zimmermann for a retrospective of the field and a discussion of role vs. responsibility.

The Architect Elevator visits the different facets of the profession, provides tips and tricks for being successful on each level, and gives additional reading recommendations.

DPR Metadata

title: "Design Practice Repository (DPR): Application Architect"
author: Olaf Zimmermann (ZIO)
date: "04, 08, 2021"
copyright: Olaf Zimmermann, 2020-2021 (unless noted otherwise). All rights reserved.
license: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License