Agile Architecture ©

In an upcoming paper on road mapping an Enterprise Architecture I am outlining the principles behind an Agile Enterprise Architecture delivery method.  Before the paper is completed I want to discuss the fundamentals of the agile approach and the reasons I am  motivated to develop it.

The fundamentals of this delivery method encompass a fusion of best practices from agile software development, and a hybrid of the architecture delivery methods as outlined in DoDAF 2.0 and TOGAF 9.0 architecture frameworks. I am not redefining or changing agile techniques, nor altering architecture delivery methods in the established frameworks.  This is a marriage of  industry proven processes and principles that brings the benefits of agile software development methodologies to enterprise architecture development.

The motivations behind tying agile methodologies to architectural delivery method (ADM) are listed below in no particular order.

1. Bring continuous process improvement to all phases of the ADM.
2. Introduce metrics and KPI's from lean systems engineering and agile methodologies into ADM.
3. Insure the most suitable architecture addressing the problem domains is being developed.
4. Speed time to deployment of actual architecture.

Philosophically I am striving to create the most usable end products from a complex problem set.  We have a rich and complete set of models in DoDAF, delivery method in TOGAF, and an empirical process control model exercised through agile methodology.

How best to tie these together is the quest, and I am traveling iteratively and aggressively towards this goal.