Software Architecture in the Agile Life Cycle

In this paper, the authors propose a set of techniques and practices to leverage the agile approach to software architecture-increasing overall quality, streamlining development practices and providing business value as a constant flow. The paper describes issues that are related to component API design and behavior-driven design, continuous measurement of complexity, automated quality-attribute evaluation and design rationale recording. The reader should take away from the paper several techniques to research and try, a basic development life cycle, and some leads for further investigation.