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

Abstract

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.

Evaluation of a process for architectural assumption management in software development

“…They mentioned that involving students in empirical studies could lead to issues (e.g., generalizability), and they used the guidelines proposed by Carver et al [12] to alleviate the related risks. Tofan et al [16] conducted a case study with 7 graduate students and 13 practitioners, and an experiment with 113 graduate and undergraduate students who took the software architecture course. They also discussed the problems of treating students as subjects, and they used the same checklist proposed by Carver et al [12].…”

How to support a co-creative research approach in order to foster impact. The development of a Co-creation Impact Compass for healthcare researchers

“…This would further strengthen the evidence that a co-creative approach fosters the acceptability and societal value of research outcome [2,3]. Studies that have examined the effectiveness of specific tools from our Co-creation Impact Compass, like personas [34] and consensus methods [35], also show this positive association between co-creation and impact.…”

An Empirical Study on Collaborative Architecture Decision Making in Software Teams

“…In most cases, architects are now part of the software team, and the important architecture decisions are made by the team rather than an individual architect [8]. With this change of perspective, software architecture decision making is now mostly considered a group decision-making (GDM) activity [9,10].…”