Richard Monson-Haefel > Quotes

“Consider thinking of architectural decisions as investments and take into account the associated rate of return, it is a useful approach for finding out how pragmatic or fit for purpose every option on the table is.”
― Richard Monson-Haefel, 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know

“Defer the actual decision until a decision can be made more responsibly, based on actual knowledge, but not so late that it is not possible to take advantage of the knowledge.”
― Richard Monson-Haefel, 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know

“Good ideas kill projects. Sometimes it's a quick death, but often it's a slow, lingering death caused by missed milestones and a spiraling bug count.”
― Richard Monson-Haefel, 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know

“The truth is that even the most beautiful, elegant and re-usable architecture, framework or system will only be re-used by people who:
a) know it is there
b) know how to use it
c) are convinced that it is better than doing it themselves”
― Richard Monson-Haefel, 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know

“Although well meant, many things that are designed just to be general purpose often end up satisfying no purpose. Software components should, first and foremost, be designed for use and to fulfill that use well. Effective generality comes from understanding, and understanding leads to simplification.”
― Richard Monson-Haefel, 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know

“The young guns on your team will always want to write things themselves because it appeases their ego, whereas your more experienced people are more likely to accept that someone else has given thought to the problem domain and has something to offer in terms of a solution.”
― Richard Monson-Haefel, 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know

“In the end, all vendor products and application architectures are constrained by the same fundamental principles of distributed computing and underlying physics: applications, and the products they use, run as processes on computers of limited capacity, communicating with one another via protocol stacks and links of nonzero latency. Therefore people need to appreciate that application architecture is the primary determinant of application performance and scalability.”
― Richard Monson-Haefel, 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts

“Software development is fundamentally a design activity, in that it involves an ongoing process of decision making until the developed system goes into production.”
― Richard Monson-Haefel, 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know

“Software architects have to take responsibility for their decisions as they have much more influential power in software projects than most people in organizations. Studies of software projects show over two-thirds of them either are outright failures or deliver unsuccessfully (deadline slip, budget overruns, or low customer satisfaction). Many of the root causes point to improper decisions software architects made, or failures of follow-through on the right architectural decisions.”
― Richard Monson-Haefel, 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know

“Business users specify their needs primarily through functional requirements. The nonfunctional aspects of the systems, like performance, resiliency, up-time, support needs, and the like, are the purview of the architect. However, often the preliminary testing of non-functional requirements is left until very late in the development cycle, and is sometimes delegated completely to the operations team. This is a mistake that is made far too often.”
― Richard Monson-Haefel, 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know

“Equally, there's a good chance that there's someone who you think is "just not doing it right" and is undermining the project. In these cases, the technology you need to solve your problem is very old and well established indeed, in fact it's possibly the most important technical innovation in the history of humanity. What you need is a conversation.”
― Richard Monson-Haefel, 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know

“Remember that application development is not a beauty contest, so stop looking for flaws and wasting time chasing perfection.”
― Richard Monson-Haefel, 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know

“One thing most software architects fail to realize is that a software architect is also a leader.”
― Richard Monson-Haefel, 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts

“Don't go duplicating representations, or having multiple transports just for the fun of it, but do always consider the possibility that decomposition of your system by non–functional parameters may reveal opportunities to allow diverse solutions to your customers' advantage.”
― Richard Monson-Haefel, 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know

“As a developer you rarely get the time to sit back and really look at how the whole system fits together. As an architect, this is your main focus. While developers are furiously building classes, methods, tests, user interfaces and databases, you should be making sure that all those pieces work well together.”
― Richard Monson-Haefel, 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know

“We cannot love our customers so much, love we not their customers more.”
― Richard Monson-Haefel, 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know

“When there are two possible solutions, favor the one that is simpler and based on concrete need rather than the more intricate one that boasts of generality.”
― Richard Monson-Haefel, 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know

“A good architect should lead by example, he (or she) should be able to fulfill any of the positions within his team from wiring the network, and configuring the build process to writing the unit tests and running benchmarks. Without a good understanding of the full range of technology an architect is little more than a project manager. It is perfectly acceptable for team members to have more in-depth knowledge in their specific areas but it's difficult to imagine how team members can have confidence in their architect if the architect doesn't understand the technology.”
― Richard Monson-Haefel, 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know

“The long-term interests of the software development team are best served when business drives.”
― Richard Monson-Haefel, 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know

“Design is a discovery process, as we implement we discover new information, often impossible to know up front. By accepting that design is an ongoing and empirical process in a forever changing world, we learn that the design process must be flexible and ongoing too. Clinging onto your original designs and trying to force them through is only going to end up with one result so you need to learn to understand that it will never look like that.”
― Richard Monson-Haefel, 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know

“Your vision of both macro and micro levels will be greatly enhanced by the time you spend in the belly of the beast bringing it to life.”
― Richard Monson-Haefel, 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know

“In the real world, the best architects don‘t solve hard problems they work around them.”
― Richard Monson-Haefel, 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know

“Usually, now with the benefit of hindsight, the best solution to the problem is apparent to everybody. The architect does not have to make the decision, he or she merely orchestrates the decision making process.”
― Richard Monson-Haefel, 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know

“As you work in requirements meetings to design software, pretend that your customer is not your customer. It turns out that this is a very easy thing to do, because it is true. Your customer is not your customer. Your customer‘s customer is your customer. If your customer's customer wins, your customer wins. Which means you win.”
― Richard Monson-Haefel, 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know

“...changing code or behavior is not a big issue, it just needs to be released, but revising data structures can involve a huge effort in transforming the old version into a newer one”
― Richard Monson-Haefel, 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know

“Like Janus, a software architect needs to be a keeper of doors and passageways, spanning the old and the new, incorporating creativity with sound engineering to fulfill todays requirements while planning to meet tomorrow's expectations.”
― Richard Monson-Haefel, 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know

“Many software projects get software architects involved only in the design phase, then they move to other projects or the consultation contract ends. How can they ensure that their deliberate architectural decisions have been implemented correctly? Their decisions will be at best good intentions unless they follow-through with them.”
― Richard Monson-Haefel, 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know

“Although it's difficult to measure an architect's impact on a project, if developers consistently ignore their guidance and management doesn't buy-in to their recommendations, the "rightness" of their guidance will do little to advance their career. Experienced architects understand that they need to "sell" their ideas and need to communicate effectively in order to do that.”
― Richard Monson-Haefel, 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know

“Software architects have to take responsibility for their decisions as they have much more influential power in software projects than most people in organizations.”
― Richard Monson-Haefel, 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know

“We cannot easily add lanes to roads, but we've learned how to easily add features to software. This isn't a defect of our software processes, but a virtue of the medium in which we work.”
― Richard Monson-Haefel, 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know