SATURN 2020

In large organizations, architectural design takes place at multiple levels of abstraction and organization. At the lowest decentral level, teams make design decisions based on their local knowledge and business needs, but some decisions have impact that goes beyond the team's local context. They need to take into account 'transversal concerns' at a higher or more central level, e.g., a product family or 'system of systems' level. And more levels may exist above that, such as domain or enterprise levels. Each level has their own concerns and their own architectural design decisions to be made.

Organizing architectural design across multiple levels yields a number of common challenges, such as the following:

• how to divide mandate for design decisions between central and decentral teams
• how to deal with clashes between local and central interests
• how to document designs and rationale at each level in a way that improves exchange of information and understanding of a team's context

In this tutorial, we will discuss these questions and provide answers based on our Risk and Cost Driven Architecture approach. We will show two examples from complex, real- life organizations, and give you guidance how to scale your agile architecture function successfully in your own organization.