The tension between software architecture and agility is not well understood by agile practitioners or researchers. If an agile software team spends too little time designing architecture up-front then the team faces increased risk and higher chance of failure, if the team spends too much time the delivery of value to the customer is delayed, and responding to change can become extremely difficult. This paper presents a grounded theory of agile architecture that describes how agile software teams answer the question of how much upfront architecture design effort is enough. This theory, based on grounded theory research involving 44 participants, presents six forces that affect the team's context and five strategies that teams use to help them determine how much effort they should put into up-front design.

Agile teams advocates face-to-face conversation, frequent communication and close collaboration between team members in order to work together as one team. In distributed software development, however, separation through space, time and culture affects the ability of the members of a distributed team to work together as one team. Through a Grounded Theory study that involved 55 participants from 38 different software companies in the USA, India and Australia, we investigate key concerns of distributed teams in Agile software development. We found that distributed teams need significant support from senior management in terms of organisational culture, human resource management, financial sponsorship, infrastructure and technology, and customer liaison. In this paper, we discuss the importance of senior management support for Agile software development with distributed teams.