…Humans are failure machines. We’re not success machines. We’re failure machines. We fail all the time. And it’s only through processing the feedback of our failure that we learn how to correct for them and do better. That is why it is important to stick with the choices you make and understand how well they worked.

Read the rest of Becoming An Architect at artima.com.

Only by staying with a project thru multiple releases do you get the kind of experience that leads to becoming a domain expert and a system architect. A couple failures along the way are great opportunities to learn, so by constantly moving from new thing to new thing you loose the chance to apply those lessons in a consistent way to test them. It wrecks, long term, the software solutions you’ve built as well. If this sounds pessimistic – you are missing the point. It’s about “if at first you don’t succeed…” and taking the lessons learned with you. You can’t get more optimistic then that. Great article.