Architecture Engagement Purposes: Towards a Framework for Planning "Just Enough"-Architecting in Software Engineering

Software architecture has been proven as a conceptual tool to manage the development and evolution of a software product. However, integrating architecting as an activity in software engineering is still perceived as a major challenge in practice. Our observation from many projects centered around architecture is that most organizations actually fail to plan architecting activities and align them in product development. The consequence is that the value of the architecture is underrated and the power of architecture remains more often than not unexploited. In this paper, we introduce the notion of architecture engagement purpose -- an auxiliary construct to align architecting with other engineering activities in the product lifecycle. We gained first promising results in applying it in industrial projects, where explicit architecture engagement purposes enabled the organization in planning and tracking architecting as an activity within their software engineering.