Guiding flexibility investment in agile architecting

Abstract

Agile software development pursues to deal with continuous change. But software product architectures without enough flexibility can restrict how products cope with change. However, designing for flexibility often entails high costs and risk that comes with the assumption that change will happen. Actually, in software architecture the flexibility investment decision making problem has become challenging. This paper presents a process to assist architects in MAKing dEcisions about Flexibility investment in Software Architecture (MAKEFlexi). MAKEFlexi is based on technical debt and real options approaches. Technical debt allows for estimating the additional cost derived from the lack of flexibility in software architectures, whereas the real options valuation allows for estimating the value of the flexibility that a design option could provide. MAKEFlexi has been applied to an industry project for smart grids to assist architects in making decisions about designing for flexibility to vary data storage technologies. © 2014 IEEE.