一句话：通过对三大洲21个组织32名从业者的访谈，揭示软件开发与维护中软件架构实践的活动、挑战与改进建议。
软件架构研究已活跃近四十年，在方法、技术与工具方面成果丰硕，但学界对从业者如何实际开展架构相关活动、又面临哪些困难仍知之甚少。本文通过对来自三大洲21个组织的32名从业者进行访谈，系统考察了真实的软件架构实践。研究梳理了软件需求、设计、构建与测试、维护各阶段常见的架构活动，并归纳出与之对应的挑战，发现这些挑战主要集中在管理、文档、工具和流程四个方面。作者还收集了针对这些挑战的改进建议，为后续研究与工具建设指明了方向。
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.