Bringing Architecture Thinking into Developers' Daily Activities

Abstract

In software engineering there has traditionally been a distinction between high-level architecting and lower level implementation activities (e.g. coding and testing). Those who are developing and maintaining the software are often not engaged in early design activities. For example, software programmers tend to lack design and architecture skills and architects are often blamed for not knowing how to write good code and for not being involved in low-level implementation tasks. This results in software quality issues, software implementations that drifted from initial design, and incorrect or missing architectural decisions in the code. The continuous move towards reducing upfront architecture design efforts, and the popularity of practices such as test-driven development highlight the importance of enriching software implementation practices with new architecting notions, practices and tools. This was the topic of the First International Workshop on Bringing Architecture Design Thinking into Developers' Daily Activities. In this paper we summarize the workshop