Díaz Fernández, Jessica

Garbajosa Sopeña, Juan

Pérez Benedí, Jenifer

Yagüe Panadero, Agustín

Archivo Digital UPM

Change-impact driven agile architecting

Servicio de Coordinación de Bibliotecas de la Universidad Politécnica de Madrid

*This communication is a summary of the following published article:Díaz, J., Pérez, J., Garbajosa, Yagüe 
A.: Change-Impact driven Agile Architecting. Proceedings of the 46th Hawaii International Conference on 
System Sciences (HICSS '13) doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/HICSS.2013.127  IEEE Computer Society   
ISBN 978-0-7695-4892-0 (2013) pp. 4780-4789.  
Change-Impact driven Agile Architecting* 
Jessica Díaz, Jennifer Pérez, Juan Garbajosa, Agustín Yagüe 
Technical University of Madrid (UPM) - Universidad Politécnica de Madrid 
CITSEM, Systems & Software Technology Group (SYST), ETSISI, Madrid, Spain 
{jdiaz,jenifer.perez,jgs}@eui.upm.es, agustin.yague@upm.es 
Abstract. This summary presents a solution based on the use of change-impact 
knowledge as the main driver for agile architecting. The solution consists of a 
Change Impact Analysis technique and a set of models to assist agile architects 
in the change (decision-making) process by retrieving the change-impact archi-
tectural knowledge resulting from adding or changing features iteration after it-
eration. 
Keywords: Agile software development, agile architecting, change-impact 
analysis 
1. Summary 
Software architecture (SA) is a key factor to scale up Agile Software Development 
(ASD) in large software-intensive systems. Aligning fruitfully SA and ASD requires 
leveraging the inherent qualities of architectures (e.g. abstraction, communication, 
analysis) while complying with agile principles (e.g. open to change). This alignment 
can be achieved as long as practitioners are able to count on mechanisms for enabling: 
(i) Incremental design of features. (ii) Accommodation of new features or customiza-
tions on existing features. We refer to both of them as agile architecting. 
Mechanisms for enabling agile architecting should assist and guide agile archi-
tects, specifically in (i) the decision-making process of implementing changes in each 
agile iteration, and (ii) the maintenance of the architecture integrity, i.e. the preserva-
tion of earlier architectural design decisions iteration after iteration. Regarding the 
former, the knowledge about the effects of a change upon the architecture provides 
architects with information that can be advantageously deployed to reason about how 
and where to implement that change. It also allows architects to make better evolution 
decisions based on risks, cost or viability of the change. Regarding the latter, the con-
tinuous process of architecting should never result in the software degradation as a 
consequence of intentionally or accidentally violation of earlier design decisions or 
constraints. In this sense, agile architects need knowledge about dependencies be-
tween design decisions, constraints, tradeoffs, etc., which can assist them in counter-
ing or even avoiding several well-known negative effects of software evolution—e.g. 
architectural erosion. 
The presented solution1 uses change-impact architectural knowledge as the main 
driver for agile architecting. This solution provides agile architects with knowledge to 
(i) assist and guide them in the change (decision-making) process, and   (ii) favor the 
preservation of the architecture integrity during the iterative architecting process. This 
knowledge results from analyzing the impact that changes—feature increment and/or 
evolution—introduce into the architecture, iteration after iteration in an agile process. 
The solution consists of a Change Impact Analysis (CIA) technique and modeling 
artifacts for: (i) documenting architectural knowledge—the design decisions and ra-
tionale driving the iterative architecture solution—, and (ii) tracing architecturally 
significant features with their realization in the architecture. These models are trav-
ersed using the proposed CIA technique to retrieve the architectural design decisions 
and architectural components and connections that are impacted as a consequence of 
changing features. Therefore, these models promote communication and support 
(semi-)automatically reasoning over the space of architectural knowledge.  This solu-
tion was built on previous work to design iteratively and incrementally software ar-
chitecture (see FPLA2) and deployed in Scrum (see Fig. 1). 
 
Fig. 1. A tailored Scrum with Agile Architecting 
The novelty of this contribution was to prove how the output from a CIA tech-
nique can be effectively used to assist and guide agile software architecting. To em-
pirically validate our approach we conducted a case study about smart grids in a soft-
ware factory, combining both academic and industry efforts. The results prove that (i) 
the CIA algorithm is effective in locating the impact resulting from a change, and (ii) 
this change-impact helps architects to take better decisions, especially when architec-
tural knowledge may be lost or vaporized as a result of a staff turnover. These promis-
ing results did not interfere with other agile practices and did not incur a big upfront 
design, making the agile construction and evolution of architecture possible. One of 
the main conclusions of this research is that agile architecting is feasible so that ASD 
can be scaled up to large and complex software-intensive systems. 
                                                          
1 Sponsored by the Spanish fund (INNOSEP TIN2009-13849, IMPONET TSI-020400-2010-
103, i-SSF IPT-430000-2010-038, and NEMO&CODED ITEA2 08022 IDI-20110864). 
2 The modeling framework  FPLA is available on https://syst.eui.upm.es/FPLA/home   


http://oa.upm.es/37613/1/INVE_MEM_2014_198966.pdf

Change-impact driven agile architecting

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