How software architects collaborate: Insights from collaborative software design in practice

The increasingly complex software systems are developed by globally distributed engineering teams consisting of a number of members who collaborate to gather the requirements, as well as design, implement, and test the system. Unlike other development activities, collaborative software design has not yet been studied extensively, and thus it is not fully understood how it is conducted in practice. We have commenced a series of studies to address this. As the first step, we have interviewed architects at a global software solutions provider to observe how collaborative software design works in practice. In this paper, we report the observations and insights we gained from the interviews related to (1) the various roles of software architects in collaborative software design, (2) the project-specific networks of software architects, (3) the impacts of geographic distribution, and (4) the collaboration cost drivers. We also discuss how we are using these insights to shape up our subsequent research.