The active architect - or learning from Indiana Jones

"If you want to be a good archaeologist you've got to get out of the library"!
Indiana Jones

If you want to be a good software architect, you've got to get out of the meeting room. Just like how archeology happens in the trenches, so is software architecture to be found in the versioning system.

If you do look into the versioning system, you will see that the system is not as clean as the paper might tend to show it, but it is also more revealing. The versioning system is the witness to all the little actions that made up the current architecture.