Do architects play a role in scrum?

Question

I'm currently in a "scrum" team where the whole architecture of the application is thought out by a team of architects, documented in a 40 page document in very much detail (even detailing all the names and settings of all the resources). This all took 3 months to think about and write down. Now that that part is done, the resources are all provisioned by IT and it is now my task as an engineer to "hook things up together". We do this in a "scrum" way, but actually it is already precisely known up-front what will happen in what sprint and all the requirements are already set in stone.I have some questions about this: what is the role of an architect in an agile process? What we are doing here does NOT at all seem agile to me, it's just waterfall in a scrum jacket. Wouldn't it make more sense to have an architect as part of the team an iteratively let them design stuff?And are architects still a thing anyway? As an engineer I have boots-on-the-ground experience setting things up, I have all the certifications and knowledge for determining the right way to set this up. Shouldn't a senior engineer being trusted with this rather than a non-coder?Last question: is it normal to write 40-page documents with all the architecture details before you start building? I never encountered this before at any companies (mind you, this is not a government institution, it's a for-profit company).To give context: the team exists of only 1 engineer (me), a team of architects that are all working part-time on it, a bunch of stakeholders, product owner, scrum master, external parties. It's a project that should take maybe half a year to build.

cutthegrass2 · Accepted Answer

> Shouldn't a senior engineer being trusted with this rather than a non-coder?
There's your problem right there. If your Architects are non-coders then honestly, they shouldn't be dictating the low level implementation detail, this should be left up to the engineering teams to work out.
In the UK at least, Architect is a title you give a seasoned technical person who wanted a promotion pathway but without direct line management responsibility. It wasn't until relatively recently enterprise businesses recognised they needed to introduce career pathways for proven technical people who wanted to remain technical and not managerial/political. When I started (2003) the only way to get promoted was to start managing people and to let go of the technical work. Dread to think how many great engineers were lost to this old school thinking.

thorin · Answer

It sounds like you are both the architect and the programmer or "analyst programmer" as it used to be called about 25 years ago in the UK. Someone writing masses of documentation upfront is obviously not agile. I'm working on a project as a technical architect on a programme, the main issue with this is that I don't have technical experience on the whole solution, only parts of it so I have to rely on others. Also anything enduring or shared is not easily covered by the agile/mvp style model.

Graffur · Answer

I'm of the opinion that the devs should have responsibility for the architecture of their systems.I also think there should be a layer of authority that is making decisions that span across teams like which cloud provider (AWS, Azure, etc), programming languages, tools (git, svn, trello), integration methods between systems (service buses, event hubs), other third party services, security standards, etc.