Architecture Roles
Solution, enterprise, domain and platform architecture, and where each is accountable.
5 to work through
-
intermediate Multiple choice
During preparation for an extreme flash-sale event, who should own the decision to disable a non-essential feature under load - the architect, the product owner, the on-call engineer, or an automated policy? Choose and justify.
2 min answer -
intermediate
You join as the architect for a 60-service estate you have never seen. What do you do in the first month?
2 min answer -
advanced
A fintech has a central architecture group producing designs that delivery teams then implement, and the designs keep arriving late and slightly wrong. What is the structural problem?
1 min answer -
advanced
Interview prompt. You are the only architect supporting eleven stream-aligned teams. Every design document waits on your review, median wait is nine days, and teams have started shipping without it. The CTO offers to hire two more architects. Tell me what you do.
3 min answer -
advanced
You are the first architect at a 120-engineer company with no architecture function. What do you do in the first ninety days?
1 min answer
3 terms in this topic
Architect Archetypes
The distinct scopes of architecture practice — enterprise, solution, domain and application — and the different skills and decision rights each carries.
metricArchitect Coverage Ratio
Teams served per architect before the role turns into a review queue, used to decide whether to hire reviewers or to remove the need for review.
practiceDegradation Ladder
A pre-agreed ordered list of capabilities the system sheds under load, with the ordering owned by the business and the mechanism owned by the architect.
Neighbouring topics
Architecture Fundamentals
General material on what solution architecture is and what an architect is accountable for.
Requirements to Constraints
Turning stated requirements into the constraints that actually bound a design.
Functional vs Non-Functional
Behaviour versus quality of behaviour, and why only the second constrains structure.
Architectural Drivers
The small subset of requirements whose change would force the structure to change.
Quality Attributes
Availability, latency, throughput, security, cost — expressed as testable scenarios.
Architecture Principles
Durable agreed rules that rule options out, stated with rationale and implications.
Coupling
How much one component must know about, or change alongside, another.
Cohesion
Whether the things inside a boundary belong together and change for the same reason.
Modularity
Composing a system from parts that can be understood and replaced independently.
Separation of Concerns
Organising so that a change to one concern touches one place.
Abstraction & Encapsulation
Hiding mechanism behind contract, and protecting invariants by owning state.
Architecture Styles
System-level organising shapes, and how they differ from problem-level patterns.
Evolutionary Architecture
Designing for guided incremental change rather than for correctness on day one.
Fitness Functions
Automated checks that an architectural characteristic still holds.
Architecture Documentation
What to write down, at what altitude, and what nobody will ever read.
Conway's Law
Systems mirroring the communication structure of the organisation that builds them.
Trade-off Fundamentals
Why every architecture is a set of purchases, and how to state what you gave up.
Technical Constraints
Existing estate, skills, licences and platforms as inputs rather than obstacles.
Reference Models
Shared conceptual frames — layering, tiers, viewpoints — and their limits.