research-article

A decision-making tool to support architectural designs based on quality attributes

Authors:

Italo Carlo Lopes Silva,

Patrick H. S. Brito,

Baldoino F. dos S. Neto,

Andre Almeida SilvaAuthors Info & Claims

SAC '15: Proceedings of the 30th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing

Pages 1457 - 1463

https://doi.org/10.1145/2695664.2695928

Published: 13 April 2015 Publication History

Abstract

The success of a software project is strongly related with architectural design. However, designing the right Software Architecture is a very subjective task and takes a long time, being much influenced by architect's experience and the quality of requirements engineering. This architectural knowledge, usually, is not documented, since it is considered tacit knowledge of architects or other stakeholders, and eventually dissipates. The objective of this paper is to present a tool that supports young architects by recommending a suitable architectural style, based on the system's requirements, particularly the quality attributes of the system. The tool encompasses both trade-off resolution over quality attributes and recommendation of architectural styles based on quality attributes. The proposed solution has been evaluated in the context of a specific domain of Learning Management System (LMS), in order to illustrate the tool support in the execution of an architectural design process.

References

[1]

T. Al-Naeem, I. Gorton, M. A. Babar, F. Rabhi, and B. Benatallah. A quality-driven systematic approach for architecting distributed software applications. In In Proceedings of ICSE 2005, pages 244--253. ACM Press, 2005.

Digital Library

[2]

M. A. Babar and I. Gorton. A tool for managing software architecture knowledge. In Proceedings of SHARK-ADI 2007, pages 11--, Washington, DC, USA, 2007. IEEE Computer Society.

Digital Library

[3]

L. Bass, P. Clements, and R. Kazman. Software Architecture in pratice 3rd Edition. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Reading, Massachusetts, 2012.

Digital Library

[4]

L. Bass and R. Kazman. Architecture-based development. Technical Report 007, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, apr. 1999.

[5]

J. Bosch. Software architecture: The next step. In F. Oquendo, B. Warboys, and R. Morrison, editors, EWSA, volume 3047 of LNCS, pages 194--199. Springer, 2004.

[6]

Drools. Drools - overview. http://www.drools.org/. {Accessed: 2014-09-25}.

[7]

A. Egyed and P. Grunbacher. Identifying requirements conflicts and cooperation: How quality attributes and automated traceability can help. IEEE Software, 21(6):50--58, 2004.

Digital Library

[8]

G. Elahi and E. Yu. A semi-automated decision support tool for requirements trade-off analysis. In Proceedings of COMPSAC 2011, pages 466--475, 2011.

Digital Library

[9]

D. Falessi, G. Cantone, R. Kazman, and P. Kruchten. Decision-making techniques for software architecture design: A comparative survey. ACM Comput. Surv., 43(4):33:1--33:28, Oct. 2011.

Digital Library

[10]

I. O. for Standarization. Iso standard 9126: Software engineering - product quality, parts 1, 2 and 3, 2001.

[11]

D. Garlan and M. Shaw. An introduction to software architecture. Technical Report 166, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, jan. 1994.

[12]

K. Henningsson and C. Wohlin. Understanding the relations between software quality attributes - a survey approach. In Proceedings of ICSQ 2002, Ottawa - Canada, 2002.

[13]

P. Jackson. Introduction To Expert Systems. Addison Wesley, Harlow, England, 3rd edition, 1998.

Digital Library

[14]

A. Jansen, J. S. van der Ven, P. Avgeriou, and D. K. Hammer. Tool support for architectural decisions. In Proceedings of WICSA 2007, Mumbai, India, 2007.

Digital Library

[15]

B. K. Mahesh Parmar W. U. Khan. An Architectural Decision Tool Based on Scenarios and Non-functional Requirements. In IJACSA, 2(2), 2011.

[16]

F. Martensson. Trade-off examples inside software engineering and computer science. In L. Lundberg, M. Mattsson, and C. Wohlin, editors, Software quality attributes and trade-offs. Blekinge Institute of Technology, Karlskrona, Sweden, 2005.

[17]

F. Ricci, L. Rokach, and B. Shapira. Introduction to Recommender Systems Handbook. In Recommender Systems Handbook, chapter 1, pages 1--35. Springer US, Boston, MA, 2011.

[18]

P. C. Rick Kazman, Mark Klein. Atam: Method for architecture evaluation. Technical report, CMU/SEI, Aug. 2000.

[19]

H. B. Rocha, E. d. B. Costa, P. H. d. S. Brito, and M. T. C. Cavalcante. A reference model for virtual learning environments web: Bringing the perspectives of author and publisher. In Proceedings of EDULEARN 2013, pages 1014--1021. IATED, 1--3 July, 2013 2013.

[20]

G. Ruhe. Software engineering decision support -- a new paradigm for learning software organizations. In S. Henninger and F. Maurer, editors, LSO, volume 2640 of LNCS, pages 104--113. Springer, 2002.

[21]

I. C. L. Silva, P. H. Brito, B. Neto, E. Costa, and H. Rocha. A tool for trade-off resolution on architecture-centered software development. In Proceedings of SEKE 2014, pages 35--38, Skokie, IL, USA, 2014. KSI Graduate School.

[22]

D. Tofan and M. Galster. Capturing and making architectural decisions: An open source online tool. In Proceedings of ECSAW 2014, pages 33:1--33:4, New York, NY, USA, 2014. ACM.

Digital Library

[23]

J. Ven, A. Jansen, J. Nijhuis, and J. Bosch. Design decisions: The bridge between rationale and architecture, volume Rationale Management in Software Engineering, pages 329--348. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2006.

Cited By

Hyun SHurtado J(2023)Traceability of Architectural Design Decisions and Software Artifacts: A Systematic Mapping StudyFoundations of Computing and Decision Sciences10.2478/fcds-2023-001848:4(401-423)Online publication date: 21-Dec-2023
https://doi.org/10.2478/fcds-2023-0018
Amiri ANtentos EZdun UGeiger S(2023)Tool Support for Learning Architectural Guidance Models from Architectural Design Decision ModelsProceedings of the 28th European Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs10.1145/3628034.3628037(1-14)Online publication date: 5-Jul-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3628034.3628037
Lytra ICarrillo CCapilla RZdun U(2019)Quality attributes use in architecture design decision methods: research and practiceComputing10.1007/s00607-019-00758-9Online publication date: 1-Oct-2019
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00607-019-00758-9
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

A decision-making tool to support architectural designs based on quality attributes
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Machine learning
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software organization and properties
    1. Software system structures
      1. Software architectures

Recommendations

Associating architectural issues with quality attributes: a survey on expert agreement
ECSAW '16: Proccedings of the 10th European Conference on Software Architecture Workshops

The architectural decision-making process is a complex and crucial endeavor in companies that develop large and distributed software systems. In this process, choosing and evaluating a solution for each architectural issue depends on decision drivers. ...
Architectural Decisions as Reusable Design Assets

Architectural decisions are design decisions that are hard to make or costly to change. Hence, mature software engineering and architecture design methods emphasize the importance of architectural decision-making and capture. Capturing decisions after ...
Preserving architectural decisions through architectural patterns

Architectural decisions have emerged as a means to maintain the quality of the architecture during its evolution. One of the most important decisions made by architects are those about the design approach such as the use of patterns or styles in the ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

SAC '15: Proceedings of the 30th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing

April 2015

2418 pages

ISBN:9781450331968

DOI:10.1145/2695664

Conference Chairs:
Roger L. Wainwright
University of Tulsa
,
Juan Manuel Corchado
University of Salamanca, Spain
,
Program Chairs:
Alessio Bechini
University of Pisa, Italy
,
Jiman Hong
Soongsil University, South Korea

Copyright © 2015 ACM.

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

SIGAPP: ACM Special Interest Group on Applied Computing

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 13 April 2015

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Funding Sources

European Union's Seventh Framework Programme

Conference

SAC 2015

Sponsor:

SIGAPP

SAC 2015: Symposium on Applied Computing

April 13 - 17, 2015

Salamanca, Spain

Acceptance Rates

SAC '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 291 of 1,211 submissions, 24%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 1,650 of 6,669 submissions, 25%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

4
Total Citations
View Citations
215
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)6
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)1

Reflects downloads up to 27 Jul 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Hyun SHurtado J(2023)Traceability of Architectural Design Decisions and Software Artifacts: A Systematic Mapping StudyFoundations of Computing and Decision Sciences10.2478/fcds-2023-001848:4(401-423)Online publication date: 21-Dec-2023
https://doi.org/10.2478/fcds-2023-0018
Amiri ANtentos EZdun UGeiger S(2023)Tool Support for Learning Architectural Guidance Models from Architectural Design Decision ModelsProceedings of the 28th European Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs10.1145/3628034.3628037(1-14)Online publication date: 5-Jul-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3628034.3628037
Lytra ICarrillo CCapilla RZdun U(2019)Quality attributes use in architecture design decision methods: research and practiceComputing10.1007/s00607-019-00758-9Online publication date: 1-Oct-2019
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00607-019-00758-9
Bhat MShumaiev KKoch KHohenstein UBiesdorf AMatthes F(2018)An Expert Recommendation System for Design Decision Making: Who Should be Involved in Making a Design Decision?2018 IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA)10.1109/ICSA.2018.00018(85-8509)Online publication date: Apr-2018
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSA.2018.00018

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents