Modeling and Architectural Design in Agile Development Methodologies

Agile Development Methodologies have been designed to address the problem of delivering high-quality software on time under constantly and rapidly changing requirements in business and IT environments. Agile development processes are characterized by extensive coding practice, intensive communication between stakeholders, fast iterative cycles, small and flexible teams, and minimal efforts in system modeling and architectural design. This paper presents the state-of-the-art of agile methodologies and analyzes them along the selected criteria that highlight different aspects of their theory and practice. Furthermore, the paper proposes the component paradigm as a way to bridge the gap between model-driven and agile development. Service-based component concepts applied at the level of modeling, architectural design and development can ensure and strengthen agile development principles and practices. Components provide a way of building simple and flexible software architecture that can easily scale in size and level of details in order to overcome certain limitations of agile development processes.