Insights from 15 Years of ATAM Data: Towards Agile Architecture

Agile teams strive to balance short term feature development with longer term quality concerns. These evolutionary approaches often hit a "complexity wall" from the cumulative effects of unplanned changes, resulting in unreliable, poorly performing software. Consequently, there is renewed focus on approaches to address architectural concerns within the Agile community. We present an analysis of quality attribute concerns from 15 years of Architecture Trade-off Analysis Method data, gathered from 31 projects. We found that modifiability is the dominant concern across all project types; additionally there was considerable focus on performance, availability, and interoperability. For information technology projects, a relatively new quality--deployability--has emerged as a key concern. Our results provide insights for agile teams allocating architecture-related tasks to iterations. For example they can use these results to create checklists for release planning or retrospectives to help assess whether a given quality should be addressed to support future needs.