Shouldn’t be sitting in ivory towers dispensing design documents or ideas with no basis of reality.
They should be coding. They should hang around to see how their decisions pan out.
They should be hunting down smells, listening to the team about painful areas, thinking about how to turn them around. They should work with the team to co-ordinate a strategy for redesign or a series of refactoring to turn complex code into simpler designs.
They should be sharing their experience in collaborative ways with the team to create several design choices, to clarify the pros and cons and to refine them to a best choice.
They should still be looking at the bigger picture, and always looking for ways to share that big picture. Part of it might be an XP Metaphor (or the Shared Vision). It might come out looking like an architecture diagram.
I’m sure of missed some things, and I know for a fact, most software architects can’t meet even these. Fortunately I get to work with many who do.
