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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?