Architectural Misalignment: An Experience Report

It has been well documented that there is a correlation between the structure of an architecture and the organization that produces it. More concretely there is a correlation between task interdependencies and coordination among the people or teams realizing these tasks. The amount of coordination needed among teams is related to the nature of these task interdependencies. As the scale and complexity of organization and systems grow it is not uncommon to have factors such as geographic boundaries, organization boundaries, cultural differences, and so forth impede the ability of certain individuals or teams to coordinate effectively. While there is some understanding of the factors that impede the ability of teams to coordinate, the factors that cause task interdependence in software systems is less well understood. The current view is that it is the interactions across module boundaries (assuming a module is assigned as a task or work item to a single team) that cause task interdependence; we have found that this view is not sufficient. In this paper we present three cases where additional architectural mechanisms created task interdependencies that the organizations were unable to accommodate. We go on to discuss the implications of these findings and suggest future research activities.