Lately both Pawel Brodzinski and Martin Fowler have been letting people know that architecture and agile are not incompatible. I wholeheartedly agree, and actually am I a bit surprised at the extent to which people seem to think these two approaches are mutually exclusive – they seem pretty compatible to me. At is root, I think this is a case of fixed mind. The architects get stuck in a mind of designing up front, and the agilists get stuck in the idea of always being flexible.
This reflects a natural tendency we all have to stick with an idea just a bit too much – “when you’re holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
And this presents an good opportunity to be skillful - to know how to balance and blend the approaches to arrive at a process that works for the specific case at hand. The role of architecture in software is not to specify every last screen in advance – it is to define broad layers of functionality and the patterns of interaction between them. With those layers identified, there is still plenty of space in which an agile team can evolve the solution.
Any problem here is one the we invent.
