Architect tools

Steve Loughran took the piss out of architects during the lightning talks at Apachecon, claiming that we (and when I say we I was the only mug to put my hand up!) worked only in M$ Word and PowerPoint. Well, I'm glad to say that I put him straight on that one, his blog post on the subject which proposes "ArchitectUnit" now acknowledges that I was right all along and there is a lot more to the job than that, namely Visio diagrams as well. Hopefully we can now expect to see our efforts recognised for the true value they add, with not only ArchitectUnit but why not an ant task to turn our priceless hard work directly into fully operational systems? Thus avoiding all the opportunities for mistakes to creep in during the so called analysis and development phases of a project, and highlighting the fact that innacurate claims in the vendor marketing literature on which we base our product selections is the *real* reason why IT projects so often fail to live up to their promises. ;-)