Identifying and Recording Software Architectural Assumptions in Agile Development
Chen Yang, Peng Liang · 2014
Abstract—Architects and involved stakeholders constantly make Architectural Assumptions (AAs) in architecture design. These assumptions, as an important part of architectural knowledge, need to be well managed in the whole architecting lifecycle. However, they are always retained in the heads of various stakeholders and left undocumented, which results in architectural knowledge vaporization, especially in agile development when documentation is not a must and priority. In this paper, we propose a novel method that is composed of two parts – Architectural Assumption Library (AAL) to help architects identify AAs and Architectural Assumption Card (AAC) to record them based on a simplified conceptual model of AA. An architect from an industry project of Embedded Systems that using agile development was invited to employ this method in the project to identify and record AAs. It shows that the proposed method can help architects to easily identify and record AAs, which is promising to facilitate architecture design, maintenance, and evolution in agile development. Keywords—software architecture; architectural assumption; agile development I.