12 More Essential Skills for Software Architects

Master The Crucial Technical Skills Every Software Architect Needs!

To succeed as a software architect, you must master both technical skills and soft skills. Dave Hendricksen illuminated the soft skills in his highly-regarded 12 Essential Skills for Software Architects. Now, in 12 More Essential Skills for Software Architects he turns to the technical side.

Drawing on his decades of experience, Hendricksen organizes technical skills into three areas.

PROJECT SKILLS: driving projects from ideation through delivery
TECHNOLOGY SKILLS: building, buying, and/or leveraging the right technologies
VISIONARY SKILLS: realizing an architectural vision that improves long-term competitiveness

He helps you develop and sharpen these key technical skills: from conceptualizing solutions to developing platforms and governance, and from selecting technology innovations to infusing architectures with an entrepreneurial spirit.

This guide reveals the technical skills you need and provides a coherent framework and practical methodology for mastering them.

Taken together, Hendricksen’s two books offer the most complete, practical pathway to excellence in software architecture. They’ll guide you through every step of your architecture career—from getting the right position to thriving once you have it.

Essential Architect Skills

Visionary Skills
•  Entrepreneurial Execution
•  Technology Innovation
•  Strategic Roadmapping

Technology Skills
•  Governance
•  Platform Development
•  Know-how
•  Architectural Perspective

Project Skills
•  Estimation
•  Partnership
•  Discovery
•  Management
•  Conceptualization

Dave Hendricksen is a big data architect for Thomson Reuters, where he works closely with the firm’s new product development teams to create innovative legal products for large-scale online platforms such as Westlaw.com. Hendricksen presented “Designing and Building Large-Scale Systems in an Agile World” at Carnegie Mellon University’s influential Software Engineering Institute.