What Agile Architects Do and What They Need

This presentation was created for the SATURN conference series and does not necessarily reflect the positions and views of the Software Engineering Institute.

Architecting in today’s world requires omniscient architects: technically capable, communicative, collaborative, adaptive, and stakeholder aware across time and space. Luckily, architects are supported by a myriad of tools and techniques such as TOGAF and the availability of reference architectures, architecture principles, standards, and guidelines. Yet the key success factor remains the architect’s agility: his or her soft skills and attitude while adapting to the often-changing business requirements of the stakeholders involved.

In this presentation, we will report on the architecting discipline in the Netherlands based on our experience supporting architecture-intensive organizations in various industries. Based on these experiences, we will summarize dos and don’ts for architects and demonstrate several pragmatic techniques that together form a lightweight but effective toolkit to help architects become more agile, that is, more adaptive to contexts and challenges.