Next Up

Architects are leaders. This fact does not mean architects choose every element and relation in the architecture by themselves. Software architects strengthen their influence over the design by enabling others. Grow your team’s architecture skills by collaborating with them and by creating safe opportunities for practices. This growth is just as important as making good design decisions.

The principles and practices you learned in Parts I and II give you most important things you need to know about software architecture design. Master this information and you will be an amazing software architect. What we covered here is far from the whole story. Many excellent resources are available that go deeper into documentation, viewpoints, patterns, evaluations, and specific technologies. As you grow as an architect, never stop going deeper, learning more.

Your next step? Use what you learned to build amazing software! To help get you started on your journey as an architect, Part III includes a collection of practical design methods organized around the four design thinking mindsets. I call it the silver toolbox as an homage to Fred Brooks’s seminal No Silver Bullet [Bro86] essay.

No single software engineering practice provides an order of magnitude improvement in productivity, reliability, or simplicity. Although there are no silver bullets, we all have a silver toolbox, a collection of software engineering methods that, when used together, make vast improvements possible. I hope you have already found a few useful tools in this book that you can add to your silver toolbox.

The state of software design practice ten years ago looked very different than it does today. Ten years from now the way we design software systems will be different still. You’re now a part of the community who will shape the future. Don’t worry—it’ll be fun. And we’ll build some awesome software along the way.