Session:Case Studies--Paper Preview

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The Impact of Requirements Knowledge and Experience on Software Architecting; An Empirical Study

Remo Ferrari, Nazim Madhavji

While the relationship between Requirements Engineering and Software Architecture (SA) has been studied increasingly in the past five years in terms of methods, tools, development models, and paradigms, that in terms of the human agents conducting these processes has barely been explored. This paper describes the impact of requirements knowledge and experience (RKE) on SA tasks. Specifically, it describes an exploratory, empirical study involving a number of architecting teams, some with requirements background and others without, all architecting from the same set of requirements. The overall results of this study suggest that architects with RKE perform better than those without, and specific areas of architecting are identified where these differences manifest. We discuss the possible implications of the findings on the areas of training, education and technology.

Architectural Misalignment; An Experience Report

Matthew Bass, Vesna Mikulovic, Len Bass, Jim Herbsleb, Marcelo Cataldo

It has been well documented that there is a correlation between the structure of an architecture and the organization that produces it. More concretely there is a correlation between task interdependencies and coordination among the people or teams realizing these tasks. The amount of coordination needed among teams is related to the nature of these task interdependencies. As the scale and complexity of organization and systems grow it is not uncommon to have factors such as geographic boundaries, organization boundaries, cultural differences, and so forth impede the ability of certain individuals or teams to coordinate effectively. While there is some understanding of the factors that impede the ability of teams to coordinate, the factors that cause task interdependence in software systems is less well understood. The current view is that it is the interactions across module boundaries (assuming a module is assigned as a task or work item to a single team) that cause task interdependence; we have found that this view is not sufficient. In this paper we present three cases where additional architectural mechanisms created task interdependencies that the organizations were unable to accommodate. We go on to discuss the implications of these findings and suggest future research activities.