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Architectural design decision visualization for architecture design: preliminary results of a controlled experiment

Published: 13 September 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Visualization of architectural design decision (ADD) and its rationale, as a kind of traceability information, is supposed to facilitate the understanding of architecture design and the reasoning behind the design rationale, which is supposed to improve the architecting process and gets better architecture design results. But the lack of empirical evaluation that supports this statement prevents industrial practitioners from using ADD visualization in their daily architecting activities. In this paper, we conducted a controlled experiment to investigate how visualization of ADD can improve the understanding of architecture design by using Compendium, an open source tool for rationale visualization. The preliminary results show that visualization of ADD and its rationale does not increase the total time for reading architecture document (including visualization diagrams of ADDs) plus designing task, and it improves the understanding of architects on existing architecture design with better new design results.

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  • (2020)The Evolution of Architectural Decision Making as a Key Focus Area of Software Architecture Research: A Semi-Systematic Literature Study2020 IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA)10.1109/ICSA47634.2020.00015(69-80)Online publication date: Mar-2020
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cover image ACM Other conferences
ECSA '11: Proceedings of the 5th European Conference on Software Architecture: Companion Volume
September 2011
79 pages
ISBN:9781450306188
DOI:10.1145/2031759
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

  • ADESSO: Adesso
  • University of Duisburg-Essen
  • Ruhr Institute: The Ruhr Institute for Software Technology

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 13 September 2011

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Author Tags

  1. architectural design decision
  2. controlled experiment
  3. design decision visualization
  4. design rationale
  5. software architecture

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  • Research-article

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ECSA '11
Sponsor:
  • ADESSO
  • Ruhr Institute
ECSA '11: Companion Volume
September 13 - 16, 2011
Essen, Germany

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Overall Acceptance Rate 48 of 72 submissions, 67%

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Improving Comprehensibility of Event-Driven Microservice Architectures by Graph-Based VisualizationsSoftware Architecture10.1007/978-3-031-70797-1_14(207-214)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2024
  • (2021)Continuous Rationale Visualization2021 Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT)10.1109/VISSOFT52517.2021.00013(33-43)Online publication date: Sep-2021
  • (2020)The Evolution of Architectural Decision Making as a Key Focus Area of Software Architecture Research: A Semi-Systematic Literature Study2020 IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA)10.1109/ICSA47634.2020.00015(69-80)Online publication date: Mar-2020
  • (2019)Model-Integrated Queries for the Analysis of Runtime EventsProceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering10.1145/3319008.3319010(35-44)Online publication date: 15-Apr-2019
  • (2015)On the effects of traceability links in differently sized software systemsProceedings of the 19th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering10.1145/2745802.2745812(1-10)Online publication date: 27-Apr-2015
  • (2015)Supporting architecture documentationProceedings of the 19th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering10.1145/2745802.2745804(1-10)Online publication date: 27-Apr-2015
  • (2015)Automatic enforcement of constraints in real-time collaborative architectural decision makingJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2015.01.056103:C(128-149)Online publication date: 1-May-2015
  • (2014)Do architectural design decisions improve the understanding of software architecture? two controlled experimentsProceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Program Comprehension10.1145/2597008.2597139(3-13)Online publication date: 2-Jun-2014
  • (2014)Towards an Evidence-Based Understanding of Emergence of Architecture through Continuous Refactoring in Agile Software DevelopmentProceedings of the 2014 IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture10.1109/WICSA.2014.45(195-204)Online publication date: 7-Apr-2014
  • (2014)The Supportive Effect of Traceability Links in Architecture-Level Software UnderstandingProceedings of the 2014 IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture10.1109/WICSA.2014.43(215-224)Online publication date: 7-Apr-2014
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