Assessing value of SW architecture

During the last decades software architecture has become increasingly important for companies creating competitive product structures. Recently more and more attention has also been focused on the costs, cost-effectiveness, productivity and value of software development and products. This study outlines concepts, principles and process of implementing a value assessment for SW architecture. It outlines also existing possibilities for implementing value assessments. The main purpose of this study is to collect experiences whether the value assessment for product architecture is useful for companies, works in practice, and what are the strengths and weaknesses of using it. This is done by implementing value assessment in a case company step by step to see which phases possibly work and which phases possibly do not work. The practical industrial case shows that proposed value assessment for product architecture is useful and supports companies trying to find value in product architecture.

2019

Software that is not aligned with the business values of the organization for which it was developed does not entirely fulfill its raison d'etre. Business values represent what is important in a company, or organization, and should influence the overall software system behavior, contributing to the overall success of the organization. However, approaches to derive a software architecture considering the business values exchanged between an organization and its market players are lacking. Our quest is to address this problem and investigate how to derive value-centered architectural models systematically. We used the Technology Research method to address this PhD research question. This methodological approach proposes three steps: problem analysis, innovation, and validation. The problem analysis was performed using systematic studies of the literature to obtain full coverage on the main themes of this work, particularly, business value modeling, software architecture methods, and software architecture derivation methods. Next, the innovation step was accomplished by creating a framework for the derivation of a software reference architecture model considering an organization's business values. The resulting framework is composed of three core modules: Business Value Modeling, Agile Reference Architecture Modeling, and Goal-Driven SOA Architecture Modeling.

Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Software and Data Technologies Special Session on Applications in Banking and Finance, 2008

The concern of a software product line architecture systematic analysis is how to take better advantage of views and analyze value and quality attributes in an organized and repetitive way. In this approach architecture descriptions evolve from the conceptual level to a more concrete level. Architecture analysis at the conceptual level provides a knowledge base of the domain architecture so as to perform a more comprehensive analysis of quality attributes at the concrete level description. Concrete architecture descriptions permit more relevant and accurate scenario-based analysis results for the development of quality attributes such as portability and adaptability.

Eighth ACIS International Conference on Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Networking, and Parallel/Distributed Computing (SNPD 2007), 2007

Current software engineering practice is focused on value-neutral processes. Value-based architecting, one of value-based software engineering agendas, involves the further consideration of the system objectives associated with different stakeholder values in selecting an optimal architectural alternative. There are several value-based architectural evaluation techniques and Cost Benefit Analysis Method (CBAM) is a widely used, established technique based on Return on Investment (ROI). The weaknesses of the existing techniques are uncertainties from several subjective errors and the heavyweight process, which requires many steps and participation of stakeholders. This paper proposes a lightweight value-based architecture evaluation technique, called LiVASAE, using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), which can support a multi-criteria decisionmaking process. The proposed technique can help overcome the major weakness of the existing techniques such as the uncertainties caused by subjective decision making and heavyweight process for architecture evaluations. Li-VASAE provides a way to measure the uncertainty level using AHP's Consistency Rate (CR) and It also provides three simplified evaluation steps. In addition, the LiVASAE presents a framework for decision makers to make technical decisions associated with business goals (or values) such as cost, time-to-market, and integration with legacy system.

koasas.kaist.ac.kr

Architectures in software intensive systems are a significant field of study while it is representing static structure, dataflow, and relationships among subsystems or components. Also, architectures could be considered an artifact as blueprint of software ...

24th Australasian Software Engineering Conference, 2015

Software architecture decision-making is critical to the success of a software system as software architecture sets the structure of the system, determines its qualities, and has far- reaching consequences throughout the system life cycle. The complex nature of the software development context and the importance of the problem has led the research community to develop several techniques, tools, and processes to assist software architects in making better decisions. Despite these effort, the adoption of such systematic approaches appears to be quite limited in practice. In addition, the practitioners are also facing new challenges as different software development methods suggest different approaches for architecture design. In this paper, we study the current software architecture decision- making practices in the industry using a case study conducted among professional software architects in three different companies in Europe. As a result, we identified different software architecture decision-making practices followed by the software teams as well as their reasons for following them, the challenges associated with them, and the possible improvements from the software architects’ point of view. Based on that, we recognized that improving software architecture knowledge management can address most of the identified challenges and would result in better software architecture decision-making.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2005

Documenting software architectures is a key aspect to achieve success when communicating the architecture to different stakeholders. Several architectural views have been used with different purposes during the design process. The traditional view on software architecture defines this in terms of components and connectors. Also, the "4+1" view model proposes several views from the same design to satisfy the interests of the different stakeholders involved in the modelling process. In this position paper we try to go a step beyond previous proposals, to detail the idea of considering the architecture as a composition of architectural design decisions. We will propose a set of elements, information and graphical notation to record the design decisions during the modelling process.

In this paper we describe the results of a replication study for comparing the effectiveness, efficiency and perceived utility of the quality-driven product architecture derivation and improvement method (QuaDAI), an architecture derivation and evaluation method that we presented in recent works, as opposed to the Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method (ATAM), a well-known architectural evaluation method used in industry. The results of the original experiment (conducted with undergraduate students) showed that QuaDAI was found to be more efficient and was perceived as easier to use than ATAM. However, although QuaDAI performed better than ATAM, we could not confirm the other variables, as the differences between both methods were not statistically significant. Therefore the goal of the replication was to verify these findings with a group of more experienced students. In the replication study QuaDAI also performed better than ATAM, but as opposed to the original study, all the variables proved to be statistically significant.

Empirical Software Engineering, 2011

Empirical Software Engineering, 2003

Software systems undergo constant change causing the architecture of the system to degenerate over time. Reversing system degeneration takes extra effort and delays the release of the next version. Improved architecture is intangible and does not translate into visible user features that can be marketed. Due to a lack of representative metrics, technical staff has problems arguing that stopping degeneration is indeed necessary and that the effort will result in an improved architecture that will pay off. We believe that architectural metrics would give technical staff better tools to demonstrate that the architecture has improved. This paper defines and uses a set of architectural metrics and outlines a process for analyzing architecture to support such an argument.