Implementations of service oriented architecture and agile software development: What works and what are the challenges?

Abstract

Today many organizations use service-oriented architecture and agile software development as their software paradigms. While both certainly have their advantages, in the fields of Empirical Software Engineering and Information Systems these have been treated in relative isolation and their impact on each other is not well understood. This paper performs a grounded theory research by empirically analyzing professional blog posts published in IBM's Developerworks platform, to find good practices and common pitfalls of using a service-oriented architecture and agile software development together. The perspective taken in this study is the one of service-oriented architecture practitioners involved in agile projects. We found that continuous integration, collaboration, governance and continuous improvement are good practices that result out of merging the two paradigms. We found that the challenges of the joint use of serviceoriented architecture and agile lie in the engineering of non-functional requirements, compliance requirements as well as up-front architecture evaluation.