Agility and Architecture: Can They Coexist?

Abstract

Agile development has significantly impacted industrial software development practices. However, despite its wide popularity, there's an increasing perplexity about software architecture's role and importance in agile approaches. Advocates of architecture's vital role in achieving quality goals for large software-intensive systems doubt the scalability of any development approach that doesn't pay sufficient attention to architecture. This article talks about software architecture being relevant to the basis of aspects such as communication among team members, inputs to subsequent design decisions, documenting design assumptions, and evaluating design alternatives. In a large software organization, implementing agile approaches isn't a straightforward adoption problem. Most likely, it will take several years to shorten the feedback cycles to benefit from the adaptability and earlier value-creation opportunities. Failure is a natural part of process improvement.