Software architecture has been an active research field for nearly four decades, in which previous studies make significant progress such as creating methods and techniques and building tools to support software architecture practice. Despite past efforts, we have little understanding of how practitioners perform software architecture related activities, and what challenges they face. Through interviews with 32 practitioners from 21 organizations across three continents, we identified challenges that practitioners face in software architecture practice during software development and maintenance. We reported on common software architecture activities at software requirements, design, construction and testing, and maintenance stages, as well as corresponding challenges. Our study uncovers that most of these challenges center around management, documentation, tooling and process, and collects recommendations to address these challenges.

翻译：软件架构作为一个活跃的研究领域已有近四十年历史，其间众多研究取得了显著进展，例如创立方法学与构建工具，以支持软件架构实践。尽管已有诸多努力，我们对从业者如何开展软件架构相关活动及其面临的挑战仍知之甚少。通过对来自三大洲21家组织的32名从业者进行访谈，我们识别出软件架构实践在软件开发与维护过程中面临的挑战。本研究报告了软件架构在需求、设计、构造与测试及维护等阶段的常见活动，以及相应的挑战。研究发现，这些挑战大多集中于管理、文档编制、工具支持与流程领域，并收集了应对这些挑战的相关建议。