Toward Agile Architecture: Insights from 15 Years of ATAM Data

Agile teams strive to balance short-term feature development with longer-term quality concerns. These evolutionary approaches often hit a "complexity wall"\´ from the cumulative effects of unplanned changes, resulting in unreliable, poorly performing software. So, the agile community is refocusing on approaches to address architectural concerns. Researchers analyzed quality attribute concerns from 15 years of Architecture Trade-Off Analysis Method data, gathered from 31 projects. Modifiability was the dominant concern across all project types; performance, availability, and interoperability also received considerable attention. For IT projects, a relatively new quality-deployability-emerged as a key concern. The study results provide insights for agile teams allocating architecture-related tasks to iterations. For example, teams can use these results to create checklists for release planning or retrospectives to help assess whether to address a given quality to support future needs. This article is part of a special issue on Software Architecture.