Today, the role of the software architect is widely recognised and most large system development projects are led by someone who takes particular responsibility for the system-wide technical factors, such as ensuring that the system will provide the right set of qualities (such as functionality, availability, security and performance) for its stakeholders.

In recent years we've also seen a welcome increase in the number of resources available to the aspiring software architect, including useful books, community web sites and interesting blogs. However ultimately the success of a project is often found to be closely related to the amount of hard won experience that the project team has - by which we really mean how many mistakes they've learned from so far! Experience is a hard but very effective teacher.

In this talk I'll share some of the pitfalls that I've encountered in my experience as a software architect and in doing do, hopefully make sure that you avoid making just the same mistakes on your projects.