Designed and delivered today, eroded tomorrow?: towards an open and lean architecting framework balancing agility and sustainability

Abstract

Architecting for cost-effectiveness, longevity and endurance has multiple, often conflicting dimensions. For instance, agile practices emphasize the need for speed in software design, development and delivery, but do not necessarily prioritize mid- to long-term qualities such as extensibility and knowledge preservation. Risk- and cost-driven architecture design methods, pragmatic modeling, and technical debt management can help practicing architects to focus their efforts, but have to be tailored to be effective (e.g., according to project context, organizational constraints, and cultural factors). Architectural styles such as service-oriented architectures and its currently trending microservices incarnation promise to improve flexibility and maintainability through their principles and patterns, but still have to prove their cost-benefit efficiency in the long run (e.g., over the multi-decade lifetime of business information systems). This keynote presentation distills a set of open, lean and sustainable architecture practices and techniques from industrial experiences and existing work in the software architecture literature, and reports on the progress towards blending these practices and techniques into a comprehensive, yet comprehensible architecture framework. The featured assets include quality stories [1], C4 architecture modeling [2], decision sharing with Y-statements [3], architecturally evident coding styles [4], architectural refactoring [1], (micro-)services principles and patterns [5], and architecture roadmapping [6]. Examples drawn from actual case studies in multiple business sectors and industries demonstrate the applicability of these practices and techniques. The presentation concludes with a discussion of the changes to the role of the software architect in the digital age [7]. These ongoing changes drive the identification of research problems and challenges for the practical adoption and lasting impact of the practices and techniques in the framework (and other contributions to the body of knowledge on sustainable architectures).