Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense © 2007 by Carnegie Mellon University 1 Pittsburgh, PA The Duties, Skills, and Knowledge of Software Architects Paul Clements, Rick Kazman, Mark Klein Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University Divya Devesh Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati Shivani Reddy, Prageti Verma Symbiosis Center for Information Technology
© 2005 by Carnegie Mellon University 2 Introduction Our interest: What does it mean to be a competent architect? Our goal: To measure and improve competence An important step along the way: What do architects do, know, and have?
© 2005 by Carnegie Mellon University 3 Architects do more than architect It is well known that architects do much more than merely design architectures. We wanted to understand these lesser-understood aspects of an architect’s job.
© 2005 by Carnegie Mellon University 4 A Survey It is possible to gather a large sample of what contributes to being an architect Duties: What an architect must do Skills: What traits characterize an architect Knowledge: What an architect must know Large body of material aimed at architects We conducted a survey of over 200 information sources and cataloged over 400 duties, skills, and knowledge area
© 2005 by Carnegie Mellon University 5 Information sources “Broadcast sources” -- written by self-styled experts, anonymous targets Web sites related to software architecture (16) Blogs and essays related to software architecture (16) Books on software architecture (25 best-sellers) Training and education sources University courses listed on web (29) Industrial courses (22) Certificate / certification programs (7) “Architecture for a living” sources Job descriptions (60 from Fortune 150 companies) Resume’s (12)
© 2005 by Carnegie Mellon University 6 Method Search for sources Glean duties, skills, and knowledge from sources Perform an affinity exercise to group the data “Document the architecture” “Produce an architecture description” Tally amount of “bandwidth” each source category spends touting each data group
© 2005 by Carnegie Mellon University 7 Duties: Sub-categories
© 2005 by Carnegie Mellon University 8 Duties: Major categories
© 2005 by Carnegie Mellon University 9 Skills: Sub-categories
© 2005 by Carnegie Mellon University 10 Skills: Major categories
© 2005 by Carnegie Mellon University 11 Knowledge: Sub-categories
© 2005 by Carnegie Mellon University 12 Knowledge: Major categories
© 2005 by Carnegie Mellon University 13 Conclusions Next: Architect questionnaires Idea is strongly reinforced that architects do much more than simply design architectures Largest discrepancy between education-and-training sources and architecture-for-a-living sources Community-wide set of duties, skills, and knowledge may form basis for what an aspiring architect has to study measurement of competence Improvement strategies