There’s no such thing as “the architecture”

It’s highly controversial to claim that there’s no such thing as “the architecture” of a system. On the one hand, folks in R&D use the term to indicate that the technical debt in the system has reached a point where more resources need to be dedicated to architecture refactoring. On the other hand, those on the business side who have at least a modicum of technology understanding use it as an argument toward their peers to explain why things take longer than expected or why we need to divert resources to address architectural issues.

Another situation where the architecture is used is when a faction in the company wants to start a project to replace the existing system or platform. The argument tends to be that the architecture of the old system is so old and poorly suited for today’s needs that it can’t be fixed. Hence, we need to start from scratch.