Roles of a Software Architect in the IT Industry
The job title of software architect implies certain knowledge and capabilities that can be of use in many different information technology roles, each of which leverages one or more core skill sets expected of a software architect.
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Macro-Level Design
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Software architects must be able to illustrate how funcitonal components interact, which is the purpose of this Entity Relationship Diagram. Few businesses run a single piece of business software. Understanding and documenting how the various applications interrelate is a core job function of the software architect and the typical work of enterprise architects, business architects, business analysts and even a chief technology officer (CTO) or director/vice president of application development.
Code Review, Mentoring
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Any software architect must have learned efficient software development techniques for writing economical, safe, legible and sustainable code he may pass along to more junior developers. Software architects often work as a software team lead, quality assurance or testing lead, or even in the more senior roles of lead architect or software director in smaller organizations in order to coach less skilled staff members.
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Application Security
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Because information security is a pervasive concern throughout an enterprise architecture, there is ample room for application architects to specialize in the security subsystems and how they interrelate with other dependent technologies. Such application architects take a role as network forensics engineer, security architect, data security architect, director of application security or even as chief security officer (CSO).
Application Design
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A software architect will know and be able to teach at least one application development methodology, including methods for capturing and recording functional and non-functional requirements. These skills are used by software architects who take a role such as senior business analyst, process analyst, application designer or enterprise architect.
Data Architect
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Understanding how applications store and retrieve data, and the various methods of optimizing those mechanics are common skills to any application developer. When coupling those mechanics with a broad understanding of the performance and sustainability trade-off of one approach with another, a software architect may specialize in a role such as data architect, enterprise data architect, database designer or data warehouse architect.
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