Difficulty of architectural decisions: a survey with professional architects

Authors:
Dan Tofan;Matthias Galster;Paris Avgeriou
Affiliations:
University of Groningen, The Netherlands;University of Canterbury, New Zealand;University of Groningen, The Netherlands
Venue:
ECSA'13 Proceedings of the 7th European conference on Software Architecture
Year:
2013

Citing 8
Cited 0

Software Architecture as a Set of Architectural Design Decisions

WICSA '05 Proceedings of the 5th Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture
Enriching software architecture documentation

Journal of Systems and Software
The architect's mindset

QoSA'07 Proceedings of the Quality of software architectures 3rd international conference on Software architectures, components, and applications
Naive architecting - understanding the reasoning process of students: a descriptive survey

ECSA'10 Proceedings of the 4th European conference on Software architecture
Architectural Decisions as Reusable Design Assets

IEEE Software
Capturing tacit architectural knowledge using the repertory grid technique (NIER track)

Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering
Mature Architecting - A Survey about the Reasoning Process of Professional Architects

WICSA '11 Proceedings of the 2011 Ninth Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture
Reducing architectural knowledge vaporization by applying the repertory grid technique

ECSA'11 Proceedings of the 5th European conference on Software architecture

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Much research exists on architectural decisions, but little work describes architectural decisions in the real-world. In this paper, we present the results of a survey with 43 architects from industry. We study characteristics of 86 real-world architectural decisions and factors that contribute to their difficulty. Also, we compare decisions made by junior architects and senior architects. Finally, we compare good and bad architectural decisions. Survey results indicate that architectural decisions take an average time of eight working days. Dependencies between decisions and the effort required to analyze decisions are major factors that contribute to their difficulty. Compared to senior architects, junior architects spend a quarter of the time on making a decision. Good architectural decisions tend to include more decision alternatives than bad decisions. Finally, we found that 86% of architectural decisions are group decisions.