Difficulty of Architectural Decisions – A Survey with Professional Architects

Tofan, Dan; Galster, Matthias; Avgeriou, Paris

doi:10.1007/978-3-642-39031-9_17

Cited by 45 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…Identifying decision makers can be supported by using established architectural frameworks such as TOGAF, since TOGAF offers explicit steps for stakeholder management, such as the identification of decision makers. Furthermore, in our previous study [3] we found out that typical size of a group of architectural decision makers in the industry is three. There are also stakeholders that influence the decision, but who are not directly involved in making this decision.…”

Section: Gadget Rootsmentioning

confidence: 92%

“…Phase 1 consists of previous work that motivated the research in this paper. While investigating how architectural decisions are made in practice [3], we found out that most architectural decisions are group decisions, similar to [4]. Furthermore, one of the outcomes of a systematic mapping study on architectural decisions literature was that there is little research on group architectural decisions [5].…”

Section: Contributionsmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…In practice, most software architecture decisions are made in groups (and involve different stakeholders), rather than by individual architects [3,4]. Unfortunately, little is known about group architectural decisions, and how to improve group architectural decision making.…”

Section: Problem Descriptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…First, we presented the plan for the session, and an overview of tasks. Second, we selected students randomly to form groups of three students, since architectural decisions involve typically three persons [3]. When the number of students was not divisible by three, we included each extra student.…”

Section: Experimental Casementioning

confidence: 99%

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Empirical evaluation of a process to increase consensus in group architectural decision making

Tofan

Galster

Lytra

et al. 2016

Information and Software Technology

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Context: Many software architectural decisions are group decisions rather than decisions made by individuals. Consensus in a group of decision makers increases the acceptance of a decision among decision makers and their confidence in that decision. Furthermore, going through the process of reaching consensus means that decision makers understand better the decision (including the decision topic, decision options, rationales, and potential outcomes). Little guidance exists on how to increase consensus in group architectural decision making.Objective: We evaluate how a newly proposed process (named GADGET) helps architects increase consensus when making group architectural decisions. Specifically, we investigate how well GADGET increases consensus in group architectural decision making, by understanding its practical applicability, and by comparing GADGET against group architectural decision making without using any prescribed approach.Method: We conducted two empirical studies. First, we conducted an exploratory case study to understand the practical applicability of GADGET in industry. We investigated whether there is a need to increase consensus, the effort and benefits of GADGET, and potential improvements for GADGET. Second, we conducted an experiment with 113 students from three universities to compare GADGET against group architectural decision making without using any prescribed approach.Results: GADGET helps decision makers increase their consensus, captures knowledge on architectural decisions, clarifies the different points of view of different decision makers on the decision, and increases the focus of the group discussions about a decision. From the experiment, we obtained causal evidence that GADGET increases consensus better than group architectural decision making without using any prescribed approach.Conclusions: There is a need to increase consensus in group architectural decisions. GADGET helps inexperienced architects increase consensus in group architectural decision making, and provides additional benefits, such as capturing rationale of decisions. Future work is needed to understand and improve other aspects of group architectural decision making.

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Section: Gadget Rootsmentioning

confidence: 92%

Section: Contributionsmentioning

confidence: 98%

Section: Problem Descriptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Experimental Casementioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Empirical evaluation of a process to increase consensus in group architectural decision making

Tofan

Galster

Lytra

et al. 2016

Information and Software Technology

Self Cite

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show abstract

“…Market & business: Tofan et al [18] conducted a survey with 43 architects from industry and report that one of the main reasons professional architects consider taking architectural decisions as 'difficult' is the fact that they have major business impact (B3) and related serious negative consequences. Betz and Wohlin [9], besides arguing for the alignment between architecture, organization, and process also highlighted the need to take market considerations into account (B5).…”

Section: B8mentioning

confidence: 99%

A Context Model for Architectural Decision Support

Carlson

Papatheocharous

Petersen

2016

2016 1st International Workshop on Decision Making in Software ARCHitecture (MARCH)

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Abstract-Developing efficient and effective decision making support includes identifying means to reduce repeated manual work and providing possibilities to take advantage of the experience gained in previous decision situations. For this to be possible, there is a need to explicitly model the context of a decision case, for example to determine how much the evidence from one decision case can be trusted in another, similar context. In earlier work, context has been recognized as important when transferring and understanding outcomes between cases. The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, we describe different ways of utilizing context in an envisioned decision support system. Thereby, we distinguish between internal and external context usage, possibilities of context representation, and context inheritance. Second, we present a systematically developed context model comprised of five types of context information, namely organization, product, stakeholder, development method & technology, and market & business. Third, we exemplary illustrate the relation of the context information to architectural decision making using existing literature.

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Factors affecting architectural decision‐making process and challenges in software projects: An industrial survey

Demir,

Chouseinoglou,

Tarhan

2024

J Software Evolu Process

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Software architecture plays a fundamental role in overcoming the challenges of the development process of large‐scale and complex software systems. The software architecture of a system is the result of an extensive process in which several stakeholders negotiate issues and solutions, and as a result of this negotiation, a series of architectural decisions are made. This survey study aims to determine the experiences of the software industry experts with respect to architectural decision‐making, the factors that are effective in decision‐making, and the technical and social problems they encounter. An online questionnaire‐based survey was conducted with 101 practitioners. The responses were analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively. Analysis of responses revealed that the majority of the participants prefer to document some or all of the architectural decisions taken and to store these documents in web‐based collaboration software. Decisions are usually made by teams of two or three, and discussion‐based approaches (brainstorming and consensus) are adopted. In the software architecture decision‐making process, “major business impact” is the most challenging situation. Information sharing and keeping track of decisions and decision rationale are areas in need of improvement as identified by most participants. From the participants' feedback and their answers to open‐ended questions, we concluded that the software architecture decision‐making process has an important role in the industry. Our key findings are that decisions made in the architectural decision‐making process are taken by teams and generally all decisions are documented. In projects where decisions are made by a single person, peer pressure is found to be significantly different from pressure in projects where decisions are made by the group. This is an indication that as the number of people in the decision‐making process increases, the disagreements also increase.

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Difficulty of Architectural Decisions – A Survey with Professional Architects

Cited by 45 publications

References 9 publications

Empirical evaluation of a process to increase consensus in group architectural decision making

Empirical evaluation of a process to increase consensus in group architectural decision making

A Context Model for Architectural Decision Support

Factors affecting architectural decision‐making process and challenges in software projects: An industrial survey

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