In this follow-on book to 12 Essential Skills for Software Architects , we get coverage of the technical skills that mirror the soft skills. There is some overlap with the first book, and some of the chapters here seemed fairly ‘soft’ to me: partnership, governance, roadmapping and entrepreneurial execution. It wasn’t particularly clear to me how ‘software architecture’ differs from general software management and development, not that the title matters much.

For a book covering technical skills, I did expect some more concrete examples, perhaps some real world case studies would have helped. As it was, I was left wondering whether I was just reading sensible sounding platitudes, or whether there were any success/disaster stories when the advice was followed/ignored.

One chapter seemed a little odd to me, chapter 6 on ‘Platforms’. This more or less assumes that you work on a big system that will evolve to become platforms. Perhaps I haven’t worked on enough (or indeed any) many major governmental IT projects, but my experience is that after a couple of decades, code tends to evolve into multi-million line monoliths.

As with the previous book, the diagrams look a bit cheesy and don’t add much. For instance, is there really any reason why ‘Relevance’, ‘Excellence’ and ‘Currency’ should form a triangle?