A plea for Architectural training

re: A plea for Architectural training

MikeWo — Mon, 09 Feb 2004 16:25:00 GMT

I totally agree with this. I work for a company that will pay for ongoing training, but I can not find suitable courses that go beyond the "ASP.Net in a nutshell", or other traning courses for MS certifications. I'm looking for courses on architecture (doesn'thave to be .Net specific), and can't seem to find much at all; especially in my area of the U.S.

I know of a Paper company in the U.S. that was disgruntled with the level of knowledge of their business in the people they were hiring. There really wasn't a good way for people to learn the skills that made it easy for them to pick up the jobs that the company needed. They solved this by talking with a local university and created a set of courses, offered through the university and taught by industry veterans and local professors. After someone completed the courses their name was put on a list of people to call when new positions in the company opened up. Perhaps the Industry DOES need to take this issue to the world of higher education and work up something similiar. Perhaps a set of courses on architecture, focusing on real world, current models, would be just what we need.

re: A plea for Architectural training

Wallym — Mon, 09 Feb 2004 19:27:00 GMT

I respectfully disagree with this statement:

In my opinion the last thing these services organisations want is a pool of skilled architects in their customer base.

We have tried to sell architectual services to customers. No one will buy "architectual services" because the customer feels that they already know how to architect a solution. It is only later, when running in the real world do you see if the chosen architecture works or doesn't. It is not a good selling point to say to a customer "You're architecture is wrong, pay us money to help you to do it right the first time." I can guarantee that going in with that as a selling point will result in "NO SALE." The developers that already work at a company will see it as an insult. We called it mentoring, coaching, and architectual assistance. Each time, the developers already there acted as if we said that they were stupid and that their children were ugly. We just decided to take it off and not mention it unless someone asked. Fewer headaches that way.

Of course, we still charged the same amount of money and they still got architectual assistance, but we took off that as a sales pitch.

Wally

re: A plea for Architectural training

Wallym — Mon, 09 Feb 2004 19:32:00 GMT

And I shouldn't say that all companinies can't sell architecture. There are a few that can. Wintellect is a good example. I guess having Jeff Prosise, Jeff Richter, and John Robbins doesn't hurt them in that area. :-)

http://www.wintellect.com/about/instructors.aspx

Wally

re: A plea for Architectural training

Udi Dahan - The Software Simplist — Mon, 09 Feb 2004 23:31:00 GMT

I agree with Wally's statements about how companies have to carefully market their message in order not to create resentment in client teams.

Furthermore, an interesting question was raised - who's responsible for teaching budding architects the basics ? From my experience, the universities fail at this rather miserably, and no one's filled the void yet.

However, I'm not sure that software architecture should be divorced from software development. Too many times I watch as architects define some elaborate systems model, that eventually does not end up in code for the simple reason that it is not feasible. Worse, often these same architects blame the developers when the system does not deliver, for the reason that the developers didn't follow the architecture. Had the developers followed the architecture to the letter, the code just wouldn't have run.

I believe that architects need to be grown from the ranks of software developers in order to mitigate these problems.

I've yet to be proven wrong =)

re: A plea for Architectural training

Sean Gephardt — Tue, 10 Feb 2004 04:50:00 GMT

I have to agree with Udi on this one (see previous comment). As a software developer, the range of my personal knowledge has coming from two areas: trial and error and learning from other more experienced people in my field.
There always has to be some trial and error when learning a new language or new platform (to push the boundardies), and I think it's difficult to progress one's career without practical experience (i.e. real world).

Take Outs: The Digital Doggy Bag of Blog Bits for 9 February 2004

Enjoy Every Sandwich — Tue, 10 Feb 2004 06:49:00 GMT

The daily list of stuff I found interesting while blogreading.

re: A plea for Architectural training

Wallym — Tue, 10 Feb 2004 18:11:00 GMT

I agree with Udi also. Architects are typically divorced from developers, which is a shame. Architects need to roll up their sleeves and remember how to write code.

Wally

re: A plea for Architectural training

Michael Platt — Tue, 10 Feb 2004 22:22:00 GMT

Sorry not to reply earlier, I was running a conference on MDA and only just got back online. To answer the comments:
I agree you need to be careful positioning architecture because everyone thinks they know how to do it, even when they dont!
I am less sure about the architects need to code, I will write a blog about this in the future.
thanks for the feedback

My impressions on Longhorn Developer Preview [part 2] (and a little indigo rambling)

Tiago Pascoal's WebLog — Thu, 12 Feb 2004 16:13:00 GMT

My impressions on Longhorn Developer Preview [part 2] (and a little indigo rambling)

Tiago Pascoal's WebLog — Thu, 12 Feb 2004 16:56:00 GMT

re: A plea for Architectural training

Mehran Nikoo — Tue, 17 Feb 2004 10:56:00 GMT

I agree that not only architects need to know how to write code!, but they need to code as well. I have been working on a few projects where a designer/architect was appointed, created a design/architecture far from practicality, and then left the development team with an unfeasible design.

That's why an architect should be able to write code in his/her mind when defining the high-level elements.

Also the fact that the architect will be doing some coding (can be very a small but key portion) can sell the architecture/design to developers.

re: A plea for Architectural training

Michael Platt — Tue, 17 Feb 2004 12:42:00 GMT

I am not sure that architects should be practising devs. In the building world most architects are not able to do plumbing / electrics and brickwork so why should they in the software world. Does a building architect do the main wiring panel in a house whilst the electricans look on in admiration?
I do think that they need to understand the technologies and constraints that dev's have to live with. I think the instances where an unpractical architecture was defined was just bad architecture and wouldnt necessarily be fixed by the architect being a red hot dev

re: A plea for Architectural training

Andrew Gayter — Tue, 17 Feb 2004 16:29:00 GMT

It just so happens that we (developmentor) have a .NET architecture and design class. I've just returned from Redmond having presented the second run to MS architects and developers

I believe one of the key things here is – what is an architect, or should I say what do people perceive as the role of an architect?

I’m of the belief that people base what an architect does upon their own career path and the size of organization in which they’ve worked

For example – a developer from a small software house would describe an architect as a person who defined the application framework, chose C# because he was good at it and came up with the data model as an after thought. On the flipside an architect from Morgan Stanley would know C# was the correct choice based upon several millions dollars of research (and told 1000 VB.NET programmers they’ve got to change!). Chosen application, security and infrastructure architectural models based upon industry practices and standards and if you talked to them about anything other than the technology acronym they’d glaze over, or have a meeting to go to.

Basically, I’ve concluded that only large organizations have separate individuals who are pure architects (and that’s all they do). Other organizations have designers who assume the role of an architect.

In cases where designers have been re-titled to ‘architect’ separating them from code is almost impossible. The definition of a designer is that they should be platform experts, which inherently means they come from development backgrounds.

I personally find that the title ‘architect’ is not always appropriate, which is why perhaps we get confused i.e. should architects dabble in code/technologies. Here I would suggest that the person meddling isn’t an architect (in the purest sense anyway). Here the person is a designer who has taken on the title of architect due to what are normally economic reasons i.e. the company is not of a size to warrant employing an architect and designer.

A

re: A plea for Architectural training

Michael Platt — Tue, 17 Feb 2004 19:10:00 GMT

Hi Andrew!
Yes, I had a look at your course and thought it was pretty good. It's nice to see developmentor moving up into this space.
I totally agree with you about architect roles and the "mobile" architetc who moves from design into architetcure and back again. I tend to see mainly large orgs where they have specialist architects but i accept there are a lot of architects who do both jobs. Back to the building analogy if you are building a small house then you dont need to be too fussy about the plans and the lead contractor can normally do some of the work on the house. If you are building a major skyscraper that dosnt work too well.
Anyway I totaly agree that there a designers who do both code and architetcure, pure applications architects and nowadays enterprise architects who are effectively the city planners of the building world.
Most of this bog has been at the designer / application architect level rather than pure architecture (my latest blog and the ones on modelling are more at that level). My real interest and area of work is actually enterprise architecture at the moment where there is very little guidance.
Michael

re: A plea for Architectural training

Andrew Gayter — Tue, 17 Feb 2004 23:17:00 GMT

Hi Michael,

Thanks for the vote of confidence in the course ;-)

I'm intrigued, or simply misinterpreting what you’ve said, are you saying modeling is just for architects?

A

re: A plea for Architectural training

Michael Platt — Wed, 18 Feb 2004 10:30:00 GMT

Well I only saw the outline, not the course!

No, there are multiple levels of modelling just as there are multiple levels of architects and designers. Everyone works with models, just different levels of models.

re: A plea for Architectural training

Clemens Vasters — Sat, 21 Feb 2004 11:33:00 GMT

We (newtelligence) will start an (English) architecture training series later this year.

re: A plea for Architectural training

Russ Condick — Tue, 25 May 2004 20:07:00 GMT

Hi Micheal,

I was having a similar discussion with Jimmy Nilsson and he suggested that I post my thoughts here.

If you look at established industries that require the same substantial
investment in education they tend to have standards bodies that review and
test their knowledge. They hold a professional accreditation and they
are required to keep up to date with the industry. Law, Accounting,
Medicine all follow this practice and I wish our industry would too. I
am trained as a Computer /Electronic Engineer and there is a body
called the Institute of Engineers, however they do not have a
standard accreditation or reviews.

I actually do not think that it is the responsibility of the Universities to administer this, it is the professional institute that must hold this responsiblity.

I suggest that the solution to this is to introduce a SEPA (Software
Engineers Profession Accreditation) to our industry. Rather than focus
on a specific language or products it should test generic theories and ideas. You
could have a module devoted to Design Patterns, TDD, Enterprise architecture etc.

I hire Software Engineers and the inconsistency between candidates is
immense. I would love to know that if a candidate had the SEPA then I
could at least be guaranteed of a common set of knowledge and
terminology. I also think that it is the lack of such accreditation
that is stopping our industry getting the recognition that it deserves.

What do you think?

re: A plea for Architectural training

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