  Software architecture (SA) is celebrating 25 years. This is so if we consider
the seminal papers establishing SA as a distinct discipline and scientific
publications that have identified cornerstones of both research and practice,
like architecture views, architecture description languages, and architecture
evaluation. With the pervasive use of cloud provisioning, the dynamic
integration of multi-party distributed services, and the steep increase in the
digitalization of business and society, making sound design decisions
encompasses an increasingly-large and complex problem space. The role of SA is
essential as never before, so much so that no organization undertakes `serious'
projects without the support of suitable architecture practices. But, how did
SA practice evolve in the past 25 years? and What are the challenges ahead?
There have been various attempts to summarize the state of research and
practice of SA. Still, we miss the practitioners' view on the questions above.
To fill this gap, we have first extracted the top-10 topics resulting from the
analysis of 5,622 scientific papers. Then, we have used such topics to design
an online survey filled out by 57 SA practitioners with 5 to 20+ years of
experience. We present the results of the survey with a special focus on the SA
topics that SA practitioners perceive, in the past, present and future, as the
most impactful. We finally use the results to draw preliminary takeaways.
