Documenting Agile Architecture: Practices and Recommendations

Architecture is the foundation of every software product, regardless of the process used for its development. Traditional architecture development based on three architectural phases – architectural analysis, synthesis and evaluation is considered highly ceremonial, due to the great number of artifacts it produces. In agile development, architecture is generated gradually with each iteration, as a result of continuous code refactoring, not some predefined structure. In other words, agile processes do not include any of the traditional phases (analysis, synthesis, and evaluation) of the architecture development process, while self-documenting code is the predominant form agile architecture documentation.