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Re: Tarchitects and Marketects
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Posted: Apr 15, 2004 10:06 AM
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Bill Venners: I see. The tarchitect is doing the technical architecture. The marketect is doing the business architecture. If they're going in two different directions, when the time comes that the marketect says, "Hey, we've got this great opportunity that I saw coming," it doesn't work.
Luke Hohmann: Right. It flat out doesn't work. A great example of when that divergence occurs is whenever a team says, "You can't have that for a full release," because usually these big architecture changes take at least one release to get through.
Bill Venners: "You can't have that for a full release," means, we weren't ready for it.
Luke Hohmann: And we've got to pay the price of a full release to get there. It's a sign that those people, the marketects and tarchitects, were not working in concert.
I think this grossly oversimplifies the problem, unless you come from a marketing background and have to explain to a VP or worse, a customer, why something won't be in the product until a future date.
My personal experience has been that the 'tarchitects' generally aren't very interested in which direction the product is going. As long as the 'marketects' have a reasonably thought out plan as to the direction of the market and the feature set the product needs, then most 'tarchitects' are happy to do what's needed to get there.
Again, from experience, most 'tarchitects' care about the quality of the product. Performance, scalability, maintainability, etc. The release date is a secondary consideration to most of these people. 'marketects' tend to reverse these priorities. They both likely agree on the direction the product should take. What they don't agree on is the route to take to get there.
I'm not going to sit here and pass judgement on which is more important (I'm sure we've all sat through many of these 'discussions'), because we all know the bills need to be paid and that doesn't happen if you don't deliver. Alas, your bills won't be getting paid for very long if you deliver a substandard product. So you have to work through that constant tension of 'do I get it done quick' or 'do I get it done right?'. Sometimes that's hard. Personally I've always been better served by paying the cost up front. It's an investment that generally that results in a better architecture and a more robust product. 'YAGNI' has bitten me so many times (both on stuff I've done and stuff I've inherited) that I've found it a fundamentally bad practice.
And sometimes, not being ready for it sometimes means you simply weren't ready for it. Maybe 'm' and 't' were working in concert and they were both way off the mark. Or maybe the feature needed actually is a lot of work. Sometimes a new feature is a lot of work, regardless of how good or bad the architecture is. For some reason, that basic fact is overlooked a lot. Perhaps that's because we're in a profession where you can buy hundreds of 'Learn X in range(7 hours, 21 days)' books.
As you describe a technical vs. marketing architect, I think the marketing version is an even rarer breed than the technical version. I have yet to meet a good marketect. I've met, I think, 3 good tarchitects. Has anybody had an experience with a good marketect? As of this point in my career I liken them to Bigfoot or Nessie.
And I think Matt Gerrans Yay/Boo supports my hypothesis that thinking, like driving, is dangerous. Everybody that doesn't do it in a manner similar to you is dangerous :-)
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