The impact of non-technical factors on Software Architecture

Abstract

Most of the research and pedagogical literature in Software Architecture is on technical issues. Recently, however, there has been increasing interest on the importance of non-technical factors such as leadership, communication, inter-personal skills, work habits etc. in architecting. In this paper, we continue this line of research by conducting an empirical study examining the impact of non-technical factors in Software Architecture from the viewpoint of academia. We analysed non-technical problems encountered from 15 student architecting teams to determine the types of problems students have, and also their impact on the quality of the architecture. Furthermore, we analyzed the IEEE/ACM Software Engineering and Computer Science curriculums to determine any correspondence between these curriculums and the student's architecting performance. Based on this analysis, we make recommendations for the improved education of student software architects.