How Software Architects Drive Connected Vehicles

Abstract

For many years, software engineering researchers and practitioners have tried to determine, define, and redefine the role of software architects. But we still haven't reached a real consensus. The popularity of agile methods such as Scrum and Kanban, with their clear focus on team collaboration, threatens many roles traditionally assigned to individual experts. Some organizations are even challenging the raison d'être of the software architect role. However, researchers' experiences developing connected-vehicle software revealed two reasons why successful projects still often assign architecture-related responsibilities to individual experts acting as software architects. First, the experts help effectively manage complexity; second, they act as knowledge multipliers when development must scale up.