Architectural Congruence: Toward Exploring the Software Development Process Through an Architectural Perspective

While the architecture of a software system is a critical artifact, it is often overlooked during development. Instead, developers focus on the numerous relationships and dependencies between source code files, bug and feature reports, and communications between other developers. We propose to begin bringing architecture back to the forefront of development, by extending the TESSERACT environment to support the exploration of the relationships and dependencies between the architecture, the technical artifacts of software development, and the social interactions of developers. With this tool support in place, software engineers may now begin exploring and reasoning over the development process in architectural terms, promoting congruence between their understanding of a system's architecture and how this architecture effects and is affected by the social and technical activities of software development.