The Architect's Role in Community Shepherding

Software architects don't just design architecture components or champion architecture qualities; they often must guide and harmonize the entire community of project stakeholders. The community-shepherding aspects of the architect's role have been gaining attention, given the increasing importance of complex 'organizational rewiring' scenarios such as DevOps, open source strategies, transitions to agile development, and corporate acquisitions. In these scenarios, architects would benefit by having effective models to align communities with architectures. This article discusses the 'smells' indicating that a community isn't functioning efficiently, offers a set of mitigations for those smells, and provides an overview of community types. © 2016 IEEE.