Abstract: Over the past two decades, agile software development methods have been adopted by an increasing number of organizations to improve their software development processes. In contrast to traditional methods, agile methods place more emphasis on flexible processes than on detailed upfront plans and heavy documentations. Since agile methods have proved to be successful at the team level, large organizations are now aiming to scale agile methods to the enterprise level by adopting so-called scaling agile frameworks. Scaling agile methods at the enterprise level with some amount of architectural planning prevents excessive redesign efforts and functional redundancy in application architectures. An effective evolution of application architectures requires the right trade-off between emergent and intentional architectural design and a close collaboration between agile and architecture teams. Although there is a growing body of literature on scaling agile frameworks, literature documenting the deployment of architect roles in scaling agile frameworks is still scarce.
This study describes the roles of architects in scaling agile frameworks with the help of a structured literature review. We aim to provide a primary analysis of 20 identified scaling agile frameworks. Subsequently, we thoroughly describe three popular scaling agile frameworks: Scaled Agile Framework, Large Scale Scrum, and Disciplined Agile 2.0. After specifying the main concepts of scaling agile frameworks, we characterize roles of enterprise, software, solution, and information architects, as identified in four scaling agile frameworks. Finally, we provide a discussion of generalizable findings on the role of architects in scaling agile frameworks
