In my previous article (UNDERSTANDING THE ROLE OF A SOFTWARE ARCHITECT), I explained the role of a software architect as well how we can categorize software architects. Whilst writing that article what came to my mind is, do we really know what our duties or responsibilities are as an architect. So I decided write from my experience what are some key duties or responsibilities from us as architects.

One of the key challenges, which I have seen many times in projects and dealing with other architects  or even myself for a major part of my career (which is over 21 years  now), where most times we as architects try to come up with technological and architectural solutions but we miss the actual problem we are trying to solve. Sure, we know all the tools, the technologies, the diagrams, and the notations but for what we are using these tools of our trade is a sometime a question.  I believe as an architect the most important thing required by us is not a technical write up or an end state diagram or even a large solutions document, but simply to understand what’s the problem or the challenges our customers have. Given below are some projects from my experience where the teams almost missed the clients need by trying to build sophisticated solutions but by re-evaluating the actual customers need were able to come up with “Just good enough architecture” to help the clients to get what they need.

In a project one of our customers had an issue where their system which had grown organically over the years was at a state where it was not able to scale to handle the traffic volumes any more. The architecture teams were tasked at re-implementing the key areas of the systems that needed to scale. The team came up with a pretty cool target state, but that would be almost a complete rewrite of some major areas of the system and potentially would take a considerable time and effort. However rather than jumping in to building this cool new target state, the team decided to re evaluate what the actual need was, was it to build this super cool system that can scale at large in couple of years or was it to handle the traffic loads incrementally so that business see’s the system improve and scale with the demands. Once we identified the actual need of the customer was to have the system to have the ability to grow with the traffic growth gradually as well as have a buffer and resiliency to a sudden spike, we came up with a road map on how to get to our target state incrementally. Then by  developing some simple optimizations to the data base structure, queries, introducing parallel processing to some key areas that were impacted with traffic growth, and a bit of additional hardware to support the parallel processing,  we were able to handle almost 3x the traffic load. Whilst the business was enjoying the scale, the team worked in introducing caching to reduce the loads on the database, decentralizing the data base so that loads could be handled by slave data stores, and working on breaking the system’s key areas to service orientation with cloud native features and ability to add hardware on the fly (elasticity). This bought the system to be scaled at large and it also gave the business an immediate return on investment as their business grew exponentially.

In another system, which was logistic based, the team had architected a sophisticated solution where it was micro service based, and with rich front end UI’s using the latest front end scripting frameworks and web applications. A major part of the development effort was going for the web and mobile front to make sure that they were very attractive and user friendly. However when we again re-evaluated to look at the actual need of the client, and how the client would use the system operationally, we identified that the operational staff at the client end rarely needed to use a UI, what they really needed was a simple list with data to do their job and to get the list printed when needed. Once this was identified the need for sophisticated UI’s was no longer a need. This reduced a huge complexity from the system and cut down a major portion of development efforts. Another area identified was the system mainly needed trigger based jobs that needed to execute periodically and rather than developing the components as web applications or web services as originally planned, just doing simple CLI’s- the system complexity, cost of infrastructure and development efforts could be reduced drastically.

We had a request from one of the clients that they were having a challenge where they were getting data from various sources and the time taken to load that data to their main system, which needed to happen regularly, was extremely high. Their recommendation was to see if a data science approach can be taken to use machine learning to reduce the overall time taken. So the teams were engaged and architectures were planned. However a closer look at trying to understand what the actual challenge the customer had, we identified that the overall process from end to end had multiple manual workloads  that the areas that were looked at to be automated through machine learning, would not help the client that much. However after visualizing the current work flow, identifying what are the manual bottlenecks and how they can be automated through simple automation processes, were identified that we can ensure the overall time taken can be cut down drastically and all this can be done whilst the data science aspect (which obviously takes time for training and implementation) is getting implemented. Hence the customer starts seeing benefit almost immediately.

In another project for an online transaction processing product where for the team to deliver a simple product feature to production after development completion, it was taking at least two months. They were looking at implementing sophisticated tools and revamping / rewriting the system to be cloud native etc… This was a massive project which potentially could have taken years. However when we really drill down to the actual root cause of the problem, we were able to identify that the challenge mainly was in two main areas of the system where any change done in any area of the system impacts these two key areas. So rather than trying to revamp, rewrite the complete system from scratch and bringing in new sophisticated tools up front, we were able to come up with an end state architecture, where the system would become a micro serviced, cloud native, with proper devops pipelines, and that could release features to production within couple of minutes. However more important than that, we built a simple road map where within a short period of time the product teams had the ability to safely release features within two weeks after development by bringing in QA automation to key areas and devops tooling with team collaborations to the overall project. This gave a huge boost to the product teams to release features rapidly. Later we started working towards the end state where the releases can be done within couple of minutes.

These are some example out of many which I has to get involved in, which shows that rather than trying to find technical solutions, we need to be able to understand what is the problem that our customers have, why are they looking at us to come up with a solution, and then only look at how best we can help the customer with solving their problem. Let’s face it, if the customers do not have a problem, they certainly do not need to spend on an architect. I believe “Just good enough architecture” is an approach we would need to take rather than “grand scale architecture” when coming up with solutions.