In my post Agile Architect – An Oxymoron I railed against the need for an architect in Agile software development. My concern being that the power of the title gives developers an excuse to ignore architecture. Now a couple of…

Gojko Azdic builds on the work of Nick Hines at ThoughtWorks to suggest the need for a specialized role called an Agile Architect. Yet another role – this is what we rail against being carried over from Waterfall/RUP world. Gojko…

I find this article resonates with our experience here, and the questions posted here have occupied my thoughts recently.

I would approach it this way.

If you are building an architecture from scratch, you definitely want to spend some time upfront about what approach you want to take, and you want to validate that through prototypes or whatever in your early sprints.

If you are building additional functionality on an existing architecture, then you take safely take the approach of doing just-in-time design.

It is paramount that the architect has the broad knowledge of the architecture and related products, and apply that knowledge to make judgement calls on when architectural work should be undertaken, how much flexibility should be allowed for, and when it is better to re-factor existing work to make the design more generic.

The architect should definitely have the final say on design and standards compliance, but I disagree with the notion that the architect has overall responsibility for the successful delivery of the project, at least not in all cases.

On any large project, the architect does and should share the responsibility of successful delivery.