In software engineering there has traditionally been a distinction between high-level architecting and low-level implementation activities such as coding. Those who are developing and maintain the software are often not engaged in early design phases of the software; junior software programmers tend to lack design thinking and architectural skills. On the other hand, architects are often blamed for not knowing how to write good code or not being engaged in low-level (often technical) challenges of implementing a software system. This causes a knowledge gap which results in software quality issues such as an implementation that is drifted from initial design, missing architectural choices in the code or incorrect implementation of architectural decisions.

The continuous shift towards reducing upfront architecture design efforts, and the popularity of practices such as test-first development, highlight the importance of bridging the software implementation practices with new architecting notions, practices and tools. BRIDGE'16 aims to bring the community of architects, developers, and testers together to identify and formulate challenges related to designing, implementing and maintaining the architecture.