Agilistas are to architects as Neo is to...
usual agile nonsense
It is typical for the agilistas to rail against anyone who doesn't drink their kool-aid, and so typical for them to create a straw-man to attack.
Software architects are the guardians of the design-it-up-front process. Agilists demonize this process as the Dreaded Waterfall Process. Thus architects must be demonized as Not Listening To Customers, so that their successes can be dismissed and their failures focused upon. Only it turns out that designing things up front works too. It's especially appropriate when you are going to have only one release (think space shot), or when your only means of communicating with coders is through a legal contract (think offshoring, think government and defense industry).
Prescriptive agile methods like XP claim it's impossible to do up fron design, but that is only true if you don't know how, and don't want to learn. Users needs don't change that much. It's only our understanding of their needs that changes. It evolves, it matures from no understanding at all to full understanding. It can mature in cycles of writing and discarding code, or by thorough analysis. This is the design-it-up-front secret that is heresy to the agilistas.
Someday we will come to the post-agile world. Process evangelists will someday lighten up and acknowledge that up-front-analysis can streamline coding. They will discover that user needs can be sussed out with techniques already written down and taught, but not in common use. They will come to understand that the XP practices are not the only or necessarily even the best set of practices, even though they are vastly better than no practices. They will encourage dev teams to ask WHY they should use each tool, not just whether they should. And they will learn to collect and act on feedback from their sprints, which is the forgotten half of the reason why interative design works.
Unfortunately, I'll be retired by then.
Sigh.
