Traveling Architects – A New Way of Herding Cats

Making software developers work towards a common goal may be likened to herding cats. If we further spread developers around the globe, we run increased risks of being unable to design and impose coherent software architectures on projects, potentially leading to lower quality of the resulting systems. Based on our experiences in a large, distributed research and development project, PalCom, we propose that employing techniques from active user involvement in general (and from participatory design in particular) may help in designing and sharing quality software architectures. In particular, we present the Traveling Architects technique in which a group of architects visit development locations in order to engage developers and end users in software architecture work. We argue that using techniques such as these may potentially lead to higher quality of software architectures in particular for systems developed in a distributed setting.