So one of my colleagues reading yesterdays blog shouted out to me across the office “You only like architecture because you are a c**p developer”. I took this as British humour (I hope!) however it is reasonably accurate; I am a poor programmer...

Yesterday I was in a fully day of writing training so I hope you notice some improvement in my writing! One of the main points that came out was it is very important to know who you are writing for, that is your audience. You really need to understand...

I am organising a conference next week on Architectural Modelling (at Brocket Hall , a really spectacular location; although soup will not be on the menu!). This is an area which seems to hold a lot of promise in improving quality and productivity of...

In the toilet (bathroom in the US ) here at Microsoft in the UK the mirrors have had a transfer applied that looks like a picture frame with a title underneath that says “The next big thing”. Whilst I am a little puzzled as to the meaning...

If architecting is a skill how can it improved? There is precious little architectural training available, probably the most comprehensive non technology specific architectural training being from the SEI . This lack of architectural training is a very...

In my last blog I hypothesised that Architectural analysis is slightly different from developer analysis and so needs a subtly different skill set and way of thinking. To demonstrate what I mean let me describe a real life example of an architectural...

I have been reviewing the Microsoft Pattern and Practises group new PAG Guide - Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability and struggling a bit. Firstly they talk about understanding the performance and scalability requirements and then testing...

Thinking again about the writing course I was on the other day we were told that one of the most important things you can do to make writing more understandable is to simplify things. I think that is a good principle in general, I have been to architectural...

I have been thinking a lot about architectural quality and more specifically how to measure it. Code quality can though of as code maintainability as in a maintainability index measuring things like cyclomatic complexity . These seem to be specific instances...

So if Architecture is a skill that can be taught then can it be lost? I think it can in a very strange way, not through the passage of time but by a radical change in environment. I came to this conclusion after working with a customer in Spain . ...

Architecture is great because it is so easy to look like a hero. I talked about earlier in this blog about looking like a hero with a poorly architected application but there are lots of other ways that bad architectural decisions can make you look like...

Keith Short has started a blog and has some comments about modelling . This is worth watching because: 1 Keith is very smart. 2 Keith and his team are defining what MS is doing in this space and they really understand modelling better than...

I really like architecting highly available systems; I think they are the most architecturally demanding. In fact serious performance and scalability issues often result in poor reliability or availability. The standard way to build a highly available...

Thinking about Architectural Performance and Scalability following on from my Blog yesterday it occurred to me that there is another dimension to architecture here and that is the “abilities”. Performance and Scalability are just two of the...