Structuring complexity issues for efficient realization of agile business requirements in distributed environments

Abstract

One of the ideas of agile software development is to respond to changes rather than following a plan. Constantly changing businesses result in changing requirements, to be handled in the development process. Therefore, it is essential that the underlying software architecture is capable of managing agile business processes. However, criticism on agile software development states that it lacks paying attention to architectural and design issues and therefore is bound to engender suboptimal design-decisions. We propose an architectural framework, that by explicitly distinguishing computational, coordinational, organizational, distributional, and communicational models offers a high degree of flexibility regarding architectural and design changes. The framework strength is facilitated by a) combining the characteristics and properties of architectural styles captured in a simple API, and b) offering a predefined architectural structure to the developer of distributed applications to cope with complexities of distributed environments. The benefit of our approach is a clear architectural design with minimal mutual effects of the models with respect to changes, accompanied by an efficient realization of new business requirements. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.