The ADC Triangle
As the result of a recent experience; my friend (one of the developers) questions if the architect should create the architecture with the quality of the development team(s) in mind. My friend is convinced that this is a factor to be weighed. Recently I had the opportunity to take a close look at his project and talked face-to-face with the project’s architect. He blamed the development team and process and eventually ended up hacking it all together, which obviously only made things worse. There is a reason that the customer is willing to staff a pretty large team, otherwise a single programmer would do in the first place. Wright :D
I fully agree with Dana Bredemeyer and Ruth Malan in "The Role of the Architect" that developers are a primary customer of your architecture, and that the architecture must provide value to them. Their goal is not to make your architecture successful, but rather to satisfy functionality, schedule and quality requirements. While your created architecture may be the best overall approach for the organization, this is sometimes not apparent to the development teams. As the architect you will need to function here more as a mentor and coach to enable the developers to quickly understand and effectively use the architecture. What really contributes to your success here is to be truly committed to others success and to have a good understanding of change management and how groups adopt new processes.
In conclusion, since the success of you as an architect is closely linked to the quality of the team you should participate in reviewing new team members to organize the team around the architecture. I’m not so sure that you should create the architecture with the quality of the development team in mind. Decisions then made might undermine the value delivered to your customer.