O planejamento e a emergência da arquitetura dos softwares desenvolvidos com os métodos dos agilistas

Abstract

The main objective of this document is to present an exploratory study regarding aspects of the architecture emergence that occurs along the software development process among teams that adopt agile development process models. In traditional methods, the requirements are obtained from extensive and exhaustive work, and the architecture design is defined and specified to meet this set of comprehensive and consolidated requirements. In the agile methods, it´s not possible to incorporate the traditional way of the software architecture design work, since there is no plan to collect a full set of requirements. The requirements are considered in rounds according to the stakeholders wishes and main needs. So, the architecture design is defined while the requirements are considered with the belief that the architecture design will "emerge" from the different sets of requirements that are considered to develop. Along those lines, this document presents: i) ways to design full software architecture up front; ii) how agile software development teams work out the architecture design; iii) what practices agile software development teams use when they work in software development projects; iv) how the agile principles can influence the architectural design and how the risks of working with an "emerging" architecture can be managed; and v) software project management practices considering architecture emergence in software projects and teams employing agile methods.