O trabalho do arquiteto de software no Brasil: padrões e antipadrões

Abstract

Although the skills and knowledge of software architects have already been the subject of some studies in recent years, researchers and practitioners still have not come to a clear consensus about the activities that a software architect is often responsible in practice in order to be considered successful. In recent years, due to occurrence of successive changes and evolution of new technologies, the architect´roles and even practices related to software architecture have been continuously changed in the software development life cycle. It is expected that a software architect possess a diversity of skills. In addition to technical knowledge, domain knowledge and communication skills must be considered. However, there are many job offerings for this position which have skills and roles totally different from the ones already known and considered essential by academic and industry studies. In order to better understand what software architects actually do in their daily activities in practice, and how this resembles or distances themselves from the skills, roles and knowledge cited in the literature as essential, in this work we have conducted a large-scale survey with 536 professionals working in Brazil who currently work or have worked at some period in their careers as software architects. Among the results, it is clear that the roles, responsibilities, activities and tasks performed by software architects are still largely unknown and diffuse in organizations, as important tasks to be performed by software architects are still not common sense in industry.