How to Acquire Architecture Evaluation Skills?

Acquiring architecture evaluation skills is crucial for successful architecture evaluation projects. While this book provides answers to many questions in the area of architecture evaluation and introduces a comprehensive methodology, very good architecture evaluation skills will only come with practical experience. We will point out in the following how skills for architecture evaluation complement general architecting skills. A great source of skills is to explore a large number of software systems and their architectures in great detail and to try to follow these software systems and their maintenance over their entire lifetime. Accompanying experienced evaluators is a great source of learning: observing how they work with stakeholders, thoroughly investigating the technical solutions, and presenting the results to management at the right level of abstraction.