SHOW publication #76 - ABLE Publications

A large financial company, struggling with legacy systems that did not interoperate, performed a pilot project to teach software architecture to an enthusiastic application development team. Experienced mentors, including the author, worked with the application team for seven months who completed their engineering goal successfully. However, the mentors were unsuccessful in their attempt to train any of the six members of application team to create architecture models on their own, though they were able to create them collaboratively with the mentors. This surprising result is due to the application team's strong preference for concrete artifacts over abstract ones. Even more surprising, an application developer from a different project, 'Developer X', read the architecture modeling documentation on an internal website and, without mentoring, created good architecture models within a few days. In light of this failure to teach software architecture, two short-term strategies are suggested for the use of software architecture in companies and long-term strategies are discussed.