How Much Up-Front? A Grounded theory of Agile Architecture

The tension between software architecture and agility is not well understood by agile practitioners or researchers. If an agile software team spends too little time designing architecture up-front then the team faces increased risk and higher chance of failure, if the team spends too much time the delivery of value to the customer is delayed, and responding to change can become extremely difficult. This paper presents a grounded theory of agile architecture that describes how agile software teams answer the question of how much upfront architecture design effort is enough. This theory, based on grounded theory research involving 44 participants, presents six forces that affect the team's context and five strategies that teams use to help them determine how much effort they should put into up-front design.