I have been doing some limited research recently, spurred on mostly out of curiosity, about how different companies approach software architecture teams and their philosophies behind them. Such as, the decision whether to have a team or not, how big the team is, what the team’s roles and responsibilities are within a company, etc.

From what I’ve found and from my own personal experience it seems that there is a strong correlation between software architects and software architecture teams and the way a company has organized their systems. This seems to support Conway’s Law[1].

In companies where the product or service was monolithic there was either one or relatively few software architects who mostly retained the broad strokes of the system in memory and act as a deciding factor in what and how features will be structured, engineered, etc. In these situations a software architect has more direct control over the software being built. It also doesn’t seem to scale as well.

In companies where the product is distributed, or divided into different domains or micro services, there is either no software architecture team or—like the company I’m at now—an architecture team that has a less well defined role. For instance, at the company I’m and and whose architecture team I’m a member of we have historically taken responsibility for defining how those services interface and communicate with one another and the other “interstitial” spaces between those services. Each team that owns one or more services is better versed in their service architectures than any one of us on the software architecture team could ever be.

The role and responsibilities of the software architecture team that I’m on today have never felt particularly well defined. I’m OK with ambiguity, but I’ve begun wondering recently how other organizations approach this space.

Does you company have a software architecture team? If so I’d love to learn more about how you operate. If you don’t have a software architecture team, I am equally—and maybe even more so—interested in why?

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law