Software architecture in practice: Challenges and opportunities

• Main Authors: WAN, Zhiyuan, ZHANG, Yun, XIA, Xin, JIANG, Yi, LO, David
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2023
• Subjects: Architecture practice; Common software; Design construction; Grounded theory; Method and technique; Practice; Research fields; Software development and maintenances; Software requirements; Software testing; Databases and Information Systems; Software Engineering
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/8573; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/9576/viewcontent/Software_Architecture_in_Practice__Challenges_and_Opportunities.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Software architecture has been an active research field for nearly four decades, in which previous studies make significant progress such as creating methods and techniques and building tools to support software architecture practice. Despite past efforts, we have little understanding of how practitioners perform software architecture related activities, and what challenges they face. Through interviews with 32 practitioners from 21 organizations across three continents, we identified challenges that practitioners face in software architecture practice during software development and maintenance. We reported on common software architecture activities at software requirements, design, construction and testing, and maintenance stages, as well as corresponding challenges. Our study uncovers that most of these challenges center around management, documentation, tooling and process, and collects recommendations to address these challenges.