I have only found one Software Architect truly worthy of the title: Roy Fielding (<a href="http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm</a>)<p>If you're doing anything <i>Prescriptive</i>, you're really doing design, for better or worse. Software Architecture is properly <i>Descriptive</i> -- it's an explanation of how a system works, and how to make your work fit its structure. It's not something you should ever be doing up front.<p>The GoF had a good idea to describe software in Alexanderian patterns, but they didn't really understand why and for whom his pattern system was designed, and then they fucked up the implementation in the extreme.