On the Impact of Evolving Requirements-Architecture Dependencies: An Exploratory Study
CAiSE '08 Proceedings of the 20th international conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering
Problem-solution mapping for forward and reengineering on architectural level
Proceedings of the 12th International Workshop on Principles of Software Evolution and the 7th annual ERCIM Workshop on Software Evolution
Change impact analysis in product-line architectures
ECSA'11 Proceedings of the 5th European conference on Software architecture
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Architectural quality constitutes a critical factor for contemporary software systems, especially because of their size and the needs for frequent, quick changes. For success-critical business systems, architectural decisions are of high risk for the market share and even for the existence of enterprises. These decisions are important for design processes as well as for refactoring. Because of the complexity of the decisions, e.g., uncertain, contradicting goals, unknown effects and risky conditions, decision-making is a difficult and risky task. Risks can be minimized if the decisions are made systematically. In an earlier paper, we introduced methods of Decision Theory to perform such decisions in a rational way. This paper introduces a method for evaluating alternatives of architectural decisions, for both architectural design and refactoring. This method adopts elements of the scenariobased evaluation method ALMA [1]. A practical example illustrates the application of the improved decision process.