Who Needs Software Architecture?
Dave McComb
November 10, 2003
Most firms don’t need a new architecture. They have an architecture and it works fine. If you live in a Tudor house, most of the time you don’t think about architecture, only when you want to make some pretty major changes.
You might expect, given that we do software architecture and this is on our web site, that we would eventually try to construct this theme to say, well, nearly everyone sooner or later needs a software architect. But that’s just not true. Most companies don’t need software architects and even those that do don’t need them most of the time.
Let’s take a look at some of the situations where companies don’t need software architects.
Size
Small companies generally don’t need software architects. By small we mean companies of typically fewer than 100 people, however, this can vary quite a bit depending on the complexity of the information they need to process. If they are in any standard industry and if there exists packaged software which addresses their business needs, most small-business people would be far better off to adopt that package or the package of their choice and simply live with the architecture that comes with it. For instance, in the restaurant industry now, there is a company called Squirrel that has by far the largest market share of the restaurant management applications. You can take orders on Squirrel, print out the receipts, take the credit cards, manage your inventory, schedule your wait people, cooks, busboys, and the like. For the most part, restaurant owners should not care what architecture Squirrel uses. It has an architecture but it’s not an important concern at that scale.
Stability
Larger companies most of the time will find themselves in a relatively stable state. They have a set of applications sitting on a set of platforms using a set of database management systems communicating via some networking protocol and communicating with some set of desktop or portable devices. No matter how various it is, that is their current architecture and to the extent that it is stable and they are able to maintain it, make extensions to it and satisfy their needs, that is exactly what they should do and they should live within the architecture they’ve created, no matter how accidental the architectural creation process was.
It is really only where there are relatively complex systems, where the complexity is interfering with productivity or the ability to change and respond, or where major changes to the infrastructure are being contemplated, that companies should really consider undertaking architectural projects.