Achieving Agility through Architecture Visibility

L.L.Bean is a large retail organization whose development processes must be agile in order to allow rapid enhancement and maintenance of its technology infrastructure. Over the past decade L.L.Bean’s software code-base had become brittle and difficult to evolve. An effort was launched to identify and develop new approaches to software development that would enable ongoing agility to support the ever-increasing demands of a successful business. This paper recounts L.L.Bean’s effort in restructuring its code-base and adoption of process improvements that support an architecture-based agile approach to development, governance, and maintenance. Unlike traditional refactoring, this effort was guided by an architectural blueprint that was created in a Dependency Structure Matrix where the refactoring was first prototyped before being applied to the actual code base.