4 Levels of Architectural Fail

A few years ago a friend of mine was working on a small to medium intranet project for a large customer. About 6 months in to this little gambit he heard about a poison pen email one of the architects had sent to several of the project stakeholders (many of them non-technical) criticizing their use of Flex for the UI of the app. He then provided a laundry list of reasons why he considered this a very bad technology choice.

1. His criticisms of Flex were mostly all technically wrong - like “Flex uses JDK 1.7, which isn’t deployed to the SOE, and requires a direct connection to the mainframe at all times“
2. He had been one of the principal architects on the project from the get go and had had ample opportunity to set the technical direction
3. His means of distributing the criticism, as a scaremongering “we’re doomed” rant to a non-technical audience without any “next steps” meant the team would be fighting fires for months to come
4. They weren’t using Flex anyway

While I don’t want to ascribe to malice what can be attributed to incompetence, I can’t help but wonder if we shouldn’t consider adding a CompleteFuckingSociopath “bit” to go along with the Bozo “bit”.

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