Architectural Assumptions and Their Management in Industry - An Exploratory Study

As an important type of architectural knowledge, architectural assumptions should be well managed in projects. However, little empirical research has been conducted regarding architectural assumptions and their management in software development. In this paper, we conducted an exploratory case study with twenty-four architects to analyze architectural assumptions and their management in industry. In this study, we confirmed certain findings from our previous survey on architectural assumptions (e.g., neither the term nor the concept of architectural assumption is commonly used in industry, and stakeholders may have different understandings of the architectural assumption concept). We also got five new findings: (1) architects frequently make architectural assumptions in their work; (2) the architectural assumption concept is subjective; (3) architectural assumptions are context-dependent and have a dynamic nature (e.g., turning out to be invalid or vice versa during their lifecycle); (4) there is a connection between architectural assumptions and certain types of software artifacts (e.g., requirements and design decisions); (5) twelve architectural assumptions management activities and four benefits of managing architectural assumptions were identified.