Early warning signs that an SW-Architecture is in trouble

• The architecture is forced to match the current organization.
• Top-level architecture components number more than 25.
• One requirement drives the rest of the design.
• The architecture depends upon alternatives in the system software.
• Proprietary components are being used when standard components would do.
• The component definition comes from the hardware division.
• There is redundancy not needed for reliability (or load balancing).
• The design is exception driven (emphasis on the extensibility, not on core commonalities).
• The architect or project manager has difficulty identifying the stakeholders.
• The project team has difficulty identifying the architect(s) of the system.
• Developers have a plethora of choices in how they design and code.
• The architect, when asked for architecture documentation, produces class diagrams and nothing else.
• The architect, when asked for architecture documentation, provides a large stack of automatically generated documents which no humans has ever seen.
• Documents provided are old and apparently not kept up to date.
• A developer, when asked to describe the architecture, is either unable to or describes a much different architecture than the architect presented.