Software Architect Elevator

The first half to two-thirds of this book was a little dry. I'm not a huge fan of the way Rolls-Royce does architecture and the beginning of this book goes into why architects are important and what types of things they should be trying to accomplish. He has some useful models to describe how architects fit within the business and how they can be effective.

In the last third of the book, he gets into some really powerful tips and tricks from his many decades as an enterprise architect. The chapters grow much shorter, and he starts to provide nuggets of information that are useful, actionable, and appropriate for our team to implement. One example is to not try to fully document your software application. Users are unlikely to read it, and it will often become quickly out of date. Instead, write short targeted documentation on specific features or workflows. In this case, a user might have questions about a specific area of the application and you can give them a short (easily updatable) document that answers their question(s). This is a great idea and one we hadn't thought of.

If you decide to read this book, I'd recommend sticking to the later parts unless you are considering enterprise architecture as a career.

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