The Presence and the State-of-Practice of Software Architects in the Brazilian Industry - A Survey

2024-03-01

arXiv.org

AI Summary

This study investigates the current state of software architect roles in Brazil’s industrial sector—specifically their organizational placement, role assumption mechanisms, and responsibility boundaries. Method: A structured questionnaire survey and thematic analysis were conducted with 105 practitioners across all 24 Brazilian states. Contribution/Results: Findings reveal a structural scarcity of dedicated software architects; only a minority of organizations formally appoint individuals to this role. Instead, responsibilities are commonly assumed by development managers, technical leads, and senior developers—resulting in a widespread “title-less but functionally active” practice. Architectural duties are highly generalized, spanning system design, architecture review, technical decision-making, and team mentoring. Notably, full-time architects earn significantly higher compensation than those performing architectural work incidentally. This study constitutes the first systematic empirical investigation into the structural absence and practical paradoxes surrounding software architecture roles in Brazil, offering critical evidence for understanding architectural role evolution in emerging economies globally.

Technology Category

• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Agent Architectures
• Multiagent Systems: Agent/AI Theories and Architectures
• Application Domains: Software Engineering

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Architectures and workflows that use LLMs for crowd work
• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Bridging structured and unstructured data

Abstract

Context: Software architecture intensely impacts the software quality. Therefore, the professional assigned to carry out the design, maintenance and evolution of architectures needs to have certain knowledge and skills in order not to compromise the resulting application. Objective: The aim of this work is to understand the characteristics of the companies regarding the presence or absence of software architects in Brazil. Method: This work uses the Survey research as a means to collect evidence from professionals with the software architect profile, besides descriptive statistics and thematic analysis to analyze the results. Results: The study collected data from 105 professionals distributed in 24 Brazilian states. Results reveal that (i) not all companies have a software architect, (ii) in some cases, other professionals perform the activities of a software architect and (iii) there are companies that, even having a software architecture professional, have other roles also performing the duties of such a professional. Conclusions: Professionals hired as software architects have higher salaries than those hired in other roles that carry out such activity, although many of those other professionals still have duties that are typical of software architects.

Problem

• Assessing presence of software architects in Brazilian companies
• Identifying roles performing architect duties without the title
• Comparing salaries between architects and non-architects doing similar work

Innovation

• Survey research for data collection
• Descriptive statistics for analysis
• Thematic analysis for results interpretation