Designing and applying an approach to software architecting in agile projects in education

An approach to software architecting in agile projects in education.Experiences and lessons learned from two applications of the approach.Research directions for improving education on architecting in agile projects. Software architecting activities are not discussed in most agile software development methods. That is why, the combination of software architecting and agile methods has been in the focus of numerous publications. However, there is little literature on how to approach software architecting in agile projects in education. In this paper, we present our approach to the introduction of software architecting activities in an agile project course. The approach is based on literature sources and is tailored to fit our educational goals and context. The approach has been applied in two consecutive executions of the course. We observe improved understanding on the value of architecting activities and appreciation among students on the combination of architecting activities and agile development. We applied the approach predominantly in cases with an architecturally savvy Product Owner. Further research is required to understand how the approach performs in scenarios with architecturally unsavvy Product Owners and if it needs to be adapted for these scenarios. We also conclude that more research is needed on the challenges that architects face in agile projects in order to better prepare students for practice.

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