Towards an Architectural Framework for Agile Software Development

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. In this paper we propose an architectural framework for agile software development, that by explicitly separating computational, coordinational, and communicational models offers a high degree of flexibility regarding architectural and design changes introduced by agile business processes. The framework strength is facilitated by combining the characteristics and properties of state-of-the-art middleware architectural styles captured in a simple API. The benefit of our approach is a clear architectural design with minimized effects of changes the models have on each other, accompanied by an efficient realization of new business requirements.