Architected Agile Solutions for Software-Reliant Systems

Boehm, Barry & Lane, Jo & Supannika, & Turner, Richard. (2010). Architected Agile Solutions for Software-Reliant Systems. INCOSE International Symposium. 20. 10.1007/978-3-642-12575-1_8.

How Much Architecting is Enough?

left-most plan

• Red line is the percentage of time spent on preliminary design
• Black dotted line is the percentage of time spent redoing
• Green is the sum of
  • The three lines correspond to the number of lines of code
    • Preliminary design is not necessary for 10,000 lines.
    • At around 10 million lines, the time lost by redoing can be as much as 91%.
      • Therefore, it is reasonable to spend 40% of the time on preliminary design to lower the risk of redoing the project.

chart on the right

• black line

  • Average cost for a 100,000 line project
    • The thin one corresponds to the red line in the left figure, and the two thick ones to the green and black.
    • Redo cost, design cost, total cost

• red line

  • When design costs increase by 50% due to high specification variability.
  • Increased design costs
    • →Sweet spot moves to the left.
    • = less pre-design would be appropriate.
  • With a 50% increase in cost, the sweet spot moves from 20% to 10% (actually 15% because of the 50% increase).

• green line

  • 50% additional cost when problems occur due to lack of prior design
  • Higher redo costs
    • →Sweet spot moves to the right.
    • = Better to design more in advance.
  • Sweet spot moves to 30%.
    • However, about 5-10% of the area above and below is almost flat, so it is more of a "region" than a "spot".
    • Too few and the risk skyrockets when you come to the edge of the region.

• agile

• Sufficient Design

• Deadlines and estimation errors

• Agile estimating and planning

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