Architecting in the Context of Agile Software Development: Fragility versus Flexibility

As the size and complexity of software systems increase, software development process couldn’t be bound to just codifying some modules that serve needed functionality and finding the appropriate configuration of these modules. Instead, a growing need emerges to sketch a big picture of the whole system that not only identifies basic parts of functionality, but also harmonizes these parts internally, manages how these parts will provide needed functionality, and paves the way for future adaptation. The answer to this need was software architectures. The agile approach to software development wasn’t about introducing a magical solution that will handle all development problems. However, the agile architecting approach is believed to be a source of new problems. Through this paper, we are going to explore agile architecting problems and what is needed to achieve an architecting approach that can be agile, while serving its purpose of producing a stable architecture.