Towards agile architecting: Proposing an architectural pathway within an industry 4.0 project

Abstract

Software architecture design, when performed in context of agile software development (ASD), sometimes referred as “agile architecting”, promotes the emerging and incremental design of the architectural artifact, in a sense of avoiding “big design upfront” (BDUF). Performing “agile architecting” is not always straightforward, mainly because the architecture has a required life-cycle and each stage responds to different needs. There is a lack of a pathway that guides agile architecting in an end-to-end approach (from business requirements to deployment). This paper proposes a pathway that includes architecture design from software development life-cycle (SDLC) stages of software development that use ASD approaches, where two main artifacts are considered: a candidate logical architecture and a refined logical architecture. These artifacts are included in a pathway where they receive input from business processes perspective and guide software development during ASD iterations (Sprints).