Architectural design and documentation: Waste in agile development?

Abstract

There is a problem with documentation and architectural design in agile projects. This is the result of interviews we have conducted with 37 software engineering experts from industry and academia. In our paper, we analyze the interview results and the origins of the revealed issues. We propose ways to integrate software design methodologies into agile development, and reputation mechanism to solve documentation problems. The contributions of this paper are (i) an investigation of expert opinions on design and documentation problems, (ii) an analysis of problem origins, and (iii) proposals for future improvements of agile processes.