Title

Practices in Agile Architecture Governance: Multiple Case Studies in Large Organizations

Motivation

Over the past two decades, enterprise architecture management has established itself as an important management function for large IT organizations by aligning both business and IT with strategy and goals. As a governance body, the focus of enterprise architects has been primarily on reducing the operating costs of software applications, managing the complexity of the application landscape, and improving enterprise-wide transparency so far. Driven by external factors, such as changing customer demands, regulatory changes, and technological advancements, a paradigm shift can be observed in large IT organizations. This shift entails fundamental changes in the way large IT organizations work, such as responding to changes over following plans or customer collaboration over contract negotiation. However, the traditional mindset of enterprise architects often hinders the transformation to lean-agile approaches due to their primary raison d'être and thus contradicts the new way of working per se. A reorientation of enterprise architects is therefore essential to enable the digital transformation.
As little research has been conducted on this issue, we fill this gap by providing a multiple-case study on the new role of enterprise architects in supporting large-scale agile development. We present an embedded multiple-case study of four leading German companies from the automotive, information technology, insurance and retail sectors, describe typical challenges faced by enterprise architects in large-scale agile development, and provide a set of recommendations for action for addressing them. In total, we conducted 64 semi-structured interviews with 21 persons from the three stakeholder groups: agile team, enterprise architect and management. The results indicate that the lack of capacity of enterprise architects hampers the support of agile teams and that large IT organizations lack appropriate scaling options at portfolio and organizational levels. In addition, the findings reveal that the enterprise architects' value contribution for supporting agile teams has not yet arrived at the team level, leading to significant acceptance issues. Based on our observations, we provide a collection of recommendations for action to improve the collaboration between enterprise architects and agile teams, such as the collaborative establishment of architecture principles and guidelines, the technical support of agile teams through build platforms and architectural spikes, and the establishment of communities of practice for architecture that replace traditional and tedious architecture boards.

Goal

The aim of this master's thesis is the analysis of the EAM in an agile environment. Thereby, the suitability of architecture principles and architecture circles in an agile environment is examined. At the same time, it will be examined where architectural decisions are discussed and adopted and which stakeholders are involved. In the next step, tasks and responsibilities of the enterprise architecture management in the agile environment will be analyzed in more detail. The final goal of this master's thesis is to find out how the value contribution of the EAM can be measured.
On the basis of the results, recommendations for action and a to-be EAM model with necessary artifacts, roles and a description of the interaction between the EAM process and the respective organizational level are derived. 

Research Questions

Research question 1 (RQ1): What is the motivation behind the definition of architectural principles, which architecture principles are suitable for an agile environment and who is responsible for their definition and compliance?

Research question 2 (RQ2): What kind of architectural decisions are made in an agile environment and how are they categorized, documented and communicated through the entire organization?

Research question 3 (RQ3): Which tasks, responsibilities, problems, and solutions does the enterprise architecture team have in an agile environment and what is needed for an agile EAM to be successful?

Research question 4 (RQ4): How effective is the enterprise architecture team and what are the expectations of ATs regarding collaboration and artifacts / models provided by the EAs and what approaches exist to measure the value contribution of EAM?

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