Architecture and Design in eXtreme Programming; Introducing “Developer Stories”

Architecting in the Context of Agile Software Development: Fragility Versus Flexibility

“…A metaphor is a shared story that guides development team on how the system should look like and how it works [3]. A metaphor is defined according to West as: "A story that everyonecustomers, programmers, and managers -can tell about how the system works" [22].…”

“…Even agilists like Fowler claimed being not able to understand what is meant by a metaphor and how to use it [22]. Kent Beck, the godfather of XP, tried to explain the benefits of metaphors in guiding developers through the exploration of system architecture but suddenly he surrendered to his critics and re-explained a metaphor as a gained skill not as a practice [3], [26]. However, practitioners like West & Solano argued about the necessity of having system metaphors because not having them would enforce developers to employ default sets of metaphors and this would impact the resulting design negatively [26], because there would be a demanding need to continue in refactoring the resulting design to include the desired requirements.…”

“…Many agilists emphasized the need to set up for the next development level where extending system or integrating it with another one is important [31]. However; agile proponents have what they consider a golden design rule of "YAGNI" meaning "You Are not Going to Need It" [3], [31]. This slogan implied that they do not model, or implement what they are not going to need for the current time.…”

“…Regardless of the growing need of having a big picture of the system under development and despite the increasing criticism of agile methods for not offering suitable process for large-scale systems; agilists view architecting work in light of traditional development [3]. They suppose that architecting is a tedious work that requires upfront design and massive documentation [4].…”

A Framework for Architecture-Centric Practices Integration into Agile Software Development [APIASD]

“…Agilists struggled to combine a variety of practices and activities -including architecting ones-into a process, which ensures producing agile software, which can be always responding to changing requirements and in the same time achieving business value. Architecting principles and practices advocated by agile methods are believed to result in problematic architectures [1].…”