Quotes from Richard Monson-Haefel

We cannot easily add lanes to roads, but we've learned how to easily add features to software. This isn't a defect of our software processes, but a virtue of the medium in which we work.

True success in medicine is not easy. It requires will, attention to detail, and creativity. But the lesson I took from India was that it is possible anywhere and by anyone. I can imagine few places with more difficult conditions. Yet astonishing success could be found ... what I saw was: Better is possible. It does not take genius. It takes diligence. It takes moral clarity. It takes ingenuity. And above all, it takes a willingness to try.

When there are two possible solutions, favor the one that is simpler and based on concrete need rather than the more intricate one that boasts of generality.

Most projects are built by people, and those people are the foundation for success and failure. So, it pays to think about what it takes to help make those people successful.

An architect is like an airline pilot, he might not look busy all of the time but he uses decades of experience to constantly monitor the situation, taking immediate action if he sees or hears something out of the ordinary.

Equally, there's a good chance that there's someone who you think is "just not doing it right" and is undermining the project. In these cases, the technology you need to solve your problem is very old and well established indeed, in fact it's possibly the most important technical innovation in the history of humanity. What you need is a conversation.

All architecture is design but not all design is architecture. Architecture represents the significant design decisions that shape a system, where significant is measured by cost of change. (Grady Booch)

Although it's difficult to measure an architect's impact on a project, if developers consistently ignore their guidance and management doesn't buy-in to their recommendations, the "rightness" of their guidance will do little to advance their career. Experienced architects understand that they need to "sell" their ideas and need to communicate effectively in order to do that.

The truth is that even the most beautiful, elegant and re-usable architecture, framework or system will only be re-used by people who: a) know it is there b) know how to use it c) are convinced that it is better than doing it themselves

As a developer you rarely get the time to sit back and really look at how the whole system fits together. As an architect, this is your main focus. While developers are furiously building classes, methods, tests, user interfaces and databases, you should be making sure that all those pieces work well together.

Much like an investment broker, the architect is being allowed to play with their client's money, based on the premise that their activity will yield an acceptable return on investment.

Once you accept that failures will happen, you have the ability to design your system's reaction to specific failures. Just as auto engineers create crumple zones---areas designed to protect passengers by failing first---you can create safe failure modes that contain the damage and protect the rest of the system.

Remember that application development is not a beauty contest, so stop looking for flaws and wasting time chasing perfection.

Your vision of both macro and micro levels will be greatly enhanced by the time you spend in the belly of the beast bringing it to life.

It is the architect's job to not only create functional, quality software for users, but also to do so while balancing the other departmental priorities, with the cost containment interests of the business's CEO, with the ease-of-administration interests of the operations staff, with the easeof-learning and ease-of-maintenance interests of future programming staff, and with best practices of the software architect's profession

Don't go duplicating representations, or having multiple transports just for the fun of it, but do always consider the possibility that decomposition of your system by non–functional parameters may reveal opportunities to allow diverse solutions to your customers' advantage.

Software development is fundamentally a design activity, in that it involves an ongoing process of decision making until the developed system goes into production.

The long-term interests of the software development team are best served when business drives.