Software Architecture in Practice: Challenges and Opportunities

TL;DR

This paper investigates the practical challenges faced by software architects through interviews with practitioners, highlighting issues in management, documentation, tooling, and process across various development stages.

Contribution

It provides empirical insights into real-world challenges in software architecture practice, which were previously underexplored.

Findings

Practitioners face challenges in management, documentation, tooling, and process.

Challenges are present across requirements, design, construction, testing, and maintenance stages.

Recommendations are provided to address these challenges.

Abstract

Software architecture has been an active research field for nearly four decades, in which previous studies make significant progress such as creating methods and techniques and building tools to support software architecture practice. Despite past efforts, we have little understanding of how practitioners perform software architecture related activities, and what challenges they face. Through interviews with 32 practitioners from 21 organizations across three continents, we identified challenges that practitioners face in software architecture practice during software development and maintenance. We reported on common software architecture activities at software requirements, design, construction and testing, and maintenance stages, as well as corresponding challenges. Our study uncovers that most of these challenges center around management, documentation, tooling and process, and collects recommendations to address these challenges.