A tool supporting architecture principles and guidelines in large-scale agile development

In today’s business environments, organizations are confronted with technological advancements, regulatory uncertainties, and time-to-market pressures. The ability to detect relevant changes and to react timely and effectively becomes an important determinant for business survival. As a result, enterprises apply agile methods to larger projects as a part of their digital transformation. The adoption of agile methods at scale poses new challenges such as establishing effective knowledge networks or coordinating various development activities to produce desirable enterprise-wide effects. The latter can be addressed by applying architecture principles. However, there is a lack of academic research on how architecture principles can be created and applied in large-scale agile development. Against this backdrop, we propose a prototypical web application called “Architecture Belt” that supports the establishment of architecture principles. It uses social design principles and the analogy of belts in martial arts to enforce the application of architecture principles by exerting institutional pressures on agile teams.