Years ago, when all software projects were doing big up front design, it made perfect sense to have full time architects work on an architecture a couple of months before development would start. The impact of making a wrong choice could have a disastrous impact on the project’s success, after all.

But nowadays, most projects are using agile approaches to software development with quick feedback loops where we can recalibrate our architecture every sprint. Therefore, wrong choices have only limited impact and we don’t need architects anymore - right?

In this talk, we’ll look back at what changed in software development in the past 10-15 years: from waterfall, monoliths and your own servers in your own datacenter to agile, microservices, cloud and DevOps. We’ll look at the impact these changes had on how we approach software architecture and will ask ourselves: do we still need architects?