Oct. 5th, 2007 06:46 am A "Word" I'm Tired of Hearing
Yesterday, I attended a track at Motorola's Innovation Conference -- which I have some other gripes about as well, but will not report on them here. Twice during the presentations, I heard a word that often makes me wince because of the wrongness of it: "architected." In the last few years software people have decided that "design" or "architectural design" are too hard to say, or not clear enough and have verbed "architect" and I don't like hearing it.
If you need to distinguish between the process of designing the system or software architecture from the design of the system of software components, then you can use "architectural design," otherwise "design" is a perfectly valid and descriptive word.
When I shared this complaint with my Mother the architectural engineer, she agreed with me completely. In her career, she never once heard any of the architects refer to what they were doing as anything other than designing. An architect designs architecture. That is true for buildings and software based systems.
