On Integrating Architecture Design into Engineering Agile Software Systems

Agile software system development approaches have become popular since the late 1990s. Agile method has been increasingly adopted by big players in software industry such as IBM, Microsoft, Nokia and Philips with a view to improving quality and productivity. Such quality improvement goals must be measured during system development to validate the approach, and there is a need for more qualitative and quantitative studies in Agile development methods. Literature study shows that mainly XP approaches have been explored in empirical studies with reports on students’ perceptions of XP in university case studies or with software development professionals. Management-oriented approaches, such as Scrum, and scaling up of the method using Agile architectures still require more detailed empirical study and evaluation. In this paper, we report on the evolution of our approach from Agile/XP, Agile/feature-driven, Agile /Scrum to Agile architecture/Scrum in the final year software engineering student project unit, and students’ and supervisors’ perceptions on quality and productivity from 35 student team projects sourced from the industry over eight years.