Software Architects in Large-Scale Distributed Projects: An Ericsson Case Study
Ricardo Britto, Darja Šmite, Lars‐Ola Damm · IEEE Software · 2016
Software architects are key assets for successful development projects. However, not much research has investigated the challenges they face in large-scale distributed projects. So, researchers investigated how architects at Ericsson were organized, their roles and responsibilities, and the effort they spent guarding and governing a large-scale legacy product developed by teams at multiple locations. Despite recent trends such as microservices and agile development, Ericsson had to follow a more centralized approach to deal with the challenges of scale, distribution, and monolithic architecture of a legacy software product. So, the architectural decisions were centralized to a team of architects. The team extensively used code reviews to not only check the code's state but also reveal defects that could turn into maintainability problems. The study results also suggest that the effort architects spend designing architecture, guarding its integrity and evolvability, and mentoring development teams is directly related to team maturity. In addition, significant investment is needed whenever new teams and locations are onboarded.