Managing Architectural Risk During Agile Development

Design issues discovered later in a system’s lifecycle are expensive to fix. To reduce this expense, this report proposes combining Agile Architecture Risk Management (AARM) and Continuous Risk Management (CRM) to form a process that evaluates software architecture development risk. Analyzing the tradeoffs between design pattern attributes and quality attributes enables the system’s development team to identify design issues early in the system’s lifecycle, better recognize software architectural risks during development, and assess the system impacts of architectural decisions later in the system’s lifecycle.