Agile methodologies lack upfront design and investment in the life cycle architecture, and rely primarily on the tacit knowledge of individuals and informal communication which can causehigh risks for instance, a team may make irrecoverable architectural mistakes due to lack of an appropriate design.
Cao et al.
further suggested that informal communication may not be effective when dealing with a large number of stakeholders and vast amounts of information that are characteristic of large projects.
However, there is growing recognition that lack of agility makes it difficult to make changes to accommodate evolving requirements. Also, solely relying on formal communication causes problems in understanding and communication within the development team.
Soundararajan and Arthur suggested the soft-structured framework (hybrid approach) for a larger scale system development incorporating the desirable benefits of agility like accommodating the changes to requirements even later in the development life cycle.
The development of larger scale systems requires a structured approach and therefore, combining the advantages of agile practices and structured methods can be an effective solution to accommodating change in larger scale systems while ensuring that in this hybrid approach the impact on agility should be minimal.
There will be some overhead in maintaining the architecture in agile, and a minimal amount of documentation is necessary to help developers to do their work.
Sometimes,it is significantly more productive for a developer to draw some bubbles and lines than to simply start hacking out code.
Upfront architectural design reduces the development time for new functionalities.
Each new functionality is based on the infrastructure backbone and design patterns which can reduce the time and effort in a substantial way for implementing new functionalities.