How do you become a good software architect?

Several of my OTN Archbeat podcasts have focused on relevant issues: Women in IT Architecture: An interview with enterprise architect Dr. Helen Sun, and system architect Dr. Karina Ishkhanova. http://blogs.oracle.com/archbeat/entry/podcast_show_notes_women_in IT Architecture as a Profession: An Interview with IASA CEO and founder Paul Preiss: http://blogs.oracle.com/archbeat/entry/show_notes_it_architecture_as Who gets to be an Architect: Community panel discussion: http://blogs.oracle.com/archbeat/entry/show_notes_who_gets_to_be_a_so Also, several of my columns in Oracle Magazine deal with software architect career issues. There's a complete list of the columns here: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/issue-archive/index-092378.html

In IT recruitment, I used to like to read resumes backwards by starting at the person's first job and then working my way up to more recent jobs just to see how they'd progressed from one job to another. Many software architects I came across typically started as programmers and developers, worked their way up to more senior development roles and moved into architecture. An actual architect should be able to give you the actual steps that you're looking for but from a hiring perspective this is what I noticed.

I wanted to site the references from the blog pointed by Sendhil directly here for people to refer to http://madgeek.com/Articles/Architect/EN/architect.htm. Found it very useful. Another one is http://www.martinfowler.com/articles/designDead.html#N10198 and http://www.martinfowler.com/ieeeSoftware/whoNeedsArchitect.pdf are very nicely written. Good read for aspiring architects