Guide to Becoming a Better Software Architect: Roles, Levels, Daily Activities, and Essential Skills

Several days ago senior architect Justin Miller created a GitHub project sharing his thoughts on "How to Become a Better Software Architect," which quickly gained thousands of stars.

He reflects on the essential skills, experiences, and knowledge required to become a software architect, reviewing his own journey, the technologies he has used, and lessons learned.

What is a software architect? A software architect makes high‑level design decisions and defines technical standards (programming standards, tools, platforms). Software architecture is the fundamental organization of a system, describing components, relationships, and guiding principles.

Architectural "levels" can be abstracted into three tiers:

Application level – focuses on a single application, detailed and team‑specific.

Solution level – addresses one or more applications that satisfy business needs, involving multiple teams.

Enterprise level – concerns multiple solutions, requiring high‑level abstraction and cross‑organization communication.

Architects also act as glue between groups, serving as horizontal (bridging business and development), vertical (linking management and developers), and technical connectors (integrating technologies).

Typical daily activities of a software architect include:

Defining and selecting development technologies and platforms.

Establishing coding standards, tools, review processes, and testing methods.

Supporting the understanding of business requirements.

Designing systems and making architectural decisions.

Documenting architectural designs and decisions.

Reviewing code and architecture for compliance with standards.

Collaborating with other teams and architects.

Guiding and consulting developers.

Translating high‑level designs into lower‑level specifications.

Key skills required (ten items) are: design, decision‑making, simplification, programming, documentation, communication, estimation, balancing, consulting, and market awareness.

Design – understand design patterns (GoF, MVC, MVVM), anti‑patterns, quality metrics, and explore various technology stacks.

Decision‑making – prioritize, evaluate options, use models like WSJF, recognize personal limits, and involve stakeholders.

Simplification – apply Occam's razor, view solutions from multiple angles, step back, divide and conquer, and refactor responsibly.

Programming – stay familiar with developers' daily work, experiment with new technologies, and use resources such as ThoughtWorks Technology Radar.

Documentation – maintain concise, purposeful architecture documents, generate docs from code when possible, and leverage frameworks like TOGAF or Zachman.

Reference: https://github.com/justinamiller/SoftwareArchitect