Team Architect vs Test/Software Architect

I guess most of you have heard about job titles like Test Architect, Software Architect etc.
It is a very prestigious position and a goal for many engineers.

My current thought is about virtual role of a team architect. To large extend it is related to my another blog. And here are the random spark on this topic

Team architect :

• is focused toward people instead of technology
• is trying to facilitate people integration instead of modules integration
• is looking for problems in human communication instead of protocol problems
• is motivating people to grow instead of updating obsolete module
• is working to keep team up and running instead of keeping server running
• is trying to balance workload of people instead of load of web server
• ... and so on

Peace

Do you really have working test automation

Many companies/teams/people are bragging about their automation. However I have few questions that help me to find the truth

• How many test cases do you have?
• Can you show me the "morning run" results?
• How are you handling bugs that blocks automated tests?
• What is average failure rate for the daily runs?
• How you are dealing with flaky tests?
• How much time are you spending in analyzing and support of the automation tests?
• What kind of CI your team is using and how your tests are integrated with it?
• What is your testing lab?

Note that there is no right answer for each question, but yet those questions work well to find the truth :-)