What do software architects really do?

To be successful, a software architect—or a software architecture team, collectively—must strike a delicate balance between an external focus—both outwards: Listening to customers, users, watching technology, developing a long-term vision, and inwards: driving the development teams—and an internal, reflective focus: spending time to make the right design choices, validating them, and documenting them. Teams that stray too far away from this metastable equilibrium fall into some traps that we describe as antipatterns of software architecture teams.