Content area
Full Text
SYSTEMS AND SORWARE ENGINEERING PROCESSES 12 Essential Skills for Software Architects Dave Hendricksen. 2011. Pearson/Addison Wesley Professional (http://www. pearsonhigheredl.com). 288 pages. ISBN: 978-0321717290
GSQE Body of Knowledge area: III.B Systems architecture
Don't judge a book by its cover, or in this case, by its title. Essential Skills for Software Architects by Dave Hendricksen could easily have been titled "Essential Skills for Project Managers." I found this a useful book not just for software architects but also for project managers and for just about anyone in management (technology and otherwise).
The book assumes the reader has the technical skills required to become an architect and as such focuses on 12 essential soft skills that are typically most challenging for people with technology backgrounds. These 12 skills are divided into three groups: relationship skills, personal skills, and business skills. Each chapter has a bibliography, and the name of Dale Carnegie occurs in a majority of the chapters.
Part 1 has five chapters on relationship skills. Part 2 deals with personal skills in three chapters, while Part 3 on business skills has four chapters.
The first five chapters are devoted to the five relationship skills: gracious behavior, communication, negotiation, leadership, and politics. Gracious behavior is described as the ability to choose relationships over correctness, learning to delegate, realizing that life is reflexive, acting as though words have a lasting impact, dealing with others with integrity and honesty without bluntness, forgiving and forgetting past offenses, and providing a professional service.
The message is essentially that in order to be effective individuals need to ensure their authence is...