Enterprise Architecture and Agile Development: Friends or Foes?

Nowadays, both agile development and enterprise architecture are often employed in large organizations. However there is still some confusion if these can and should be used together, and there is not much research about the possible interplay. The aim of this study is to bring new knowledge to the field of enterprise architecture and its relation to agile development. Twelve qualitative interviews with professionals in different roles, such as developers and architects, have been carried out. The participants belong to five different companies and the information obtained from them has been used to compare opinions and stated challenges regarding agile and EA. We found that some common opinions among the interviewees are; 1) agile development and enterprise architecture can be combined, 2) there are clear communication problems among architects, different teams, and project owners, and 3) there is a lack of system and application reusability.