SA@Work A Field Study of Software Architecture and Software Quality at Work

Designing and maintaining a software architecture that strikes the right balance between conflicting quality attributes is a daunting task facing every software architect. In the SA@Work project we have conducted ethnographical field studies of practicing software architects in four Danish software companies to study architectural work in general and architectural techniques in particular. In this paper, we describe observed techniques related to architectural quality as input to the architectural body of knowledge. Second, these techniques are classified according to the quality view classification framework of Garvin. Our analysis shows that techniques for assessing and ensuring quality in software architecture predominately view quality as an intrinsic quality of the architecture itself and less view it as related to business and users. This hints at a need to extend the architectpsilas toolbox and may explain observed mismatches between architectural work and agile processes.