Turkish Software Architecture Conference

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Yes, there is a Turkish software architecture conference and a large and growing community of software engineering researchers and practitioners interested in software architecture research and practice. And this is a biennial conference, which is being organized for the last six years or so. I must acknowledge that until a few months ago I was unaware of such an exciting and large community of software architecture, a topic that is very close to my heart and mind when it comes to research and practice. That was why when I was invited to give a keynote at this conference, I was extremely delighted and humbled but little curious about the conference about which I had heard nothing before.
Having been to the conference, I must say that I was really impressed by the number of participants and their interest in the area. It bodes well for the future of software architecture research and practice in such a wonderful country which is not too far from cold Northern Europe but full of warmth of East which I greatly miss. While I feel that I picked up a lot about the state of software engineering R&D in just two days and I would like to share my observations and thoughts through these pages, this post is about the topic that I chose for my talk – Agility and Architecture: Why and how they can co-exist? – and share the synopsis and slides with the folks interested in topic as we have significant research in the pipeline on this topic and would like to hear from like minded people. For the abstract, keep reading….
Agile approaches have gained popularity as a mechanism for reducing cost and increasing ability to handle change in dynamic market conditions. However, there is a significant concern about the role and importance of the issues related to the software architecture of a system being developed using agile approaches. There seems to be a lot of misconceptions about the value of sound architecture practices among agile followers. Proponents of architecture-based methods have their own doubts about the scalability of agile approaches. All these misconceptions lead to many people believe that there exists a dichotomy between agile and architecture values and principles and both can’t or shouldn’t co-exist. However, there is also a growing interest in separating the facts from myths about the necessity, importance, advantages and disadvantages of combining agile and architectural principles and approaches. This talk explores some of the motivators of the questions like, how can organizations make their development approaches agile without compromising the due role and importance of software architecture. It then discusses a few industrial cases aimed at combining agile and architectural approaches. Finally, it presents some practical strategies that can help answer questions like “Why and How can Agile and Architecture co-exist?