Roles

Business Analysis is the process of understanding business change needs, assessing the impact of those changes, capturing, analysing and documenting requirements and then supporting the communication and delivery of those requirements with relevant parties.

The term "Software Architect" is somewhat vague. The definitions we can give depend on the context. This article concentrates on architects working with a small to medium team, on multiple projects, but not so many. In these conditions, the software architect also acts as a technical expert on one or multiple platforms.

During the DotNetGuru Symposium 2003, Sami Jaber presented two kinds of architects:

·         functional architects, who optimize business processes, and have a very good knowledge about analysis methods;

·         technical architects, who design long-term, reliable and adaptive technical architectures, and constitute a technical gateway between the project manager and the developers.

We can come across other kinds of architects. You can refer to the resources presented at the bottom of this page to learn more. We will focus here on technical architects, and not on functional architects.

Here is the role of a technical architect, according to Sami:

·         Anticipate on technological evolutions

·         Build durable architectures

o    Independence with regard to API/framework providers

·         Promote genericity and abstraction

·         Bridge between developers, project managers, and business experts

·         Technological evangelization, sharp sense of communication

·         Ensure the technical directions and choices

·         Often mixed culture (.NET/J2EE/opensource)

·         First a role instead of a job