The Boomeranged Software Architect

In an agile environment, where the architect's role is not crisply defined, the architect may have to deal with a number of issues that arise during development and are considered architecture-related. Such issues range from feature requests and enhancements through to defects found during testing. Architect specifications that turn into issues boomerang the architect to resolve them. In a case study we looked at issues entered into the issue tracking system that were assigned to architects to understand the root causes for their inception. We found that many of the avoidable issues can be circumvented by better communication between the architect and other stakeholders, and by small adaptations in the development process.