Martin Fowler
and Rebecca Parsons gave a talk at QCON about architects in an agile environment. Architects worry about their jobs and where they fit in agile. Architects try to achieve reuse, documentation, see what is happening and agile can help architects by providing:1. Transparency and visibility into progress and therefore can react in a reasonable way.
2. Up to date specification of functionality through strong emphasis on testing.
3. Results in adaptable code. Reuse after the fact rather than planned. You at least know that it is useful once and then adopt it in other places.
To make it work in agile, we have to look at architects as the customer. As a customer, architect need to prioritize decisions and need to specify what they mean and remove ambiguity. Architects also need to participate as team members. Architects need to be able to code. This will give them more information to be able to make adequate decisions. It will increase trust between them and the developers.
This presentation is available on InfoQ at http://www.infoq.com/presentations/agilists-and-architects
