Guidelines for Future Agile Methodologies and Architecture Reconciliation for Software-Intensive Systems

Background: Several methodologies have been proposed since the first days of software development, from what is now named traditional/heavy methodologies, and later their counterpart, the agile methodologies. The whole idea behind agile methodologies is to produce software at a faster pace than what was considered with plan-based methodologies, which had a greater focus on documenting all tasks and activities before starting the proper software development. Problem: One issue here is that strict agilists are often against fully documenting the software architecture in the first phases of a software process development. However, architectural documentation cannot be neglected, given the well-known importance of software architecture to the success of a software project. Proposed Solution: In this article, we describe the past and current situation of agile methodologies and their relation to architecture description, as well as guidelines for future Agile Methodologies and Architecture Reconciliation. Method: We propose a literature review to understand how agile methodologies and architecture reconciliation can help in providing trends towards the success of a software project and supporting software development at a faster pace. This work was grounded in General Systems Theory as we describe the past, present, and future trends for rapid systems development through the integration of organizations, stakeholders, processes, and systems for software development. Summary of results: As extensively discussed in the literature, we found that there is a false dichotomy between agility and software architecture, and then we describe guidelines for future trends in agile methodologies and reconciliation of architecture to document agile architectures with both architectural decisions and agile processes for any system, as well as future trends to support organizations, stakeholders, processes, and systems.