Adopting Logical Architectures within Agile Projects

Abstract

Agile Software Development (ASD) is a movement that emerged in the late 1990's and since then has been increasingly adopted by organizations. They are successful in projects characterized by rapid changes, small teams and small cycles. Implementing the same agile philosophy but with an increase of complexity, i.e., large-scale agile (LSA) development, are sometimes criticized of not being as effective as typical ASD, requiring additional concerns and the need to address new research challenges. This PhD research proposes an approach for embedding architecture design in agile development, first in early analysis and then during the iterations and by properly providing the mechanisms to deal with the changes in requirements. The main result is a method for adopting logical architectures, Four-Step-Rule-Set (4SRS), properly adapted to ASD contexts, to be used as complementary approaches to an ASD lifecycle, so that ASD teams can use that information as input for delivering the working software.