research-article

Decision-making techniques for software architecture design: A comparative survey

Authors:

Davide Falessi,

Giovanni Cantone,

Philippe KruchtenAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), Volume 43, Issue 4

Article No.: 33, Pages 1 - 28

https://doi.org/10.1145/1978802.1978812

Published: 18 October 2011 Publication History

Abstract

The architecture of a software-intensive system can be defined as the set of relevant design decisions that affect the qualities of the overall system functionality; therefore, architectural decisions are eventually crucial to the success of a software project. The software engineering literature describes several techniques to choose among architectural alternatives, but it gives no clear guidance on which technique is more suitable than another, and in which circumstances. As such, there is no systematic way for software engineers to choose among decision-making techniques for resolving tradeoffs in architecture design. In this article, we provide a comparison of existing decision-making techniques, aimed to guide architects in their selection. The results show that there is no “best” decision-making technique; however, some techniques are more susceptible to specific difficulties. Hence architects should choose a decision-making technique based on the difficulties that they wish to avoid. This article represents a first attempt to reason on meta-decision-making, that is, the issue of deciding how to decide.

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Index Terms

Decision-making techniques for software architecture design: A comparative survey
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Designing software
      1. Software implementation planning
        Software design techniques
    2. Software development process management

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Published In

cover image ACM Computing Surveys

ACM Computing Surveys Volume 43, Issue 4

October 2011

556 pages

ISSN:0360-0300

EISSN:1557-7341

DOI:10.1145/1978802

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2011 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]

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Publication History

Published: 18 October 2011

Accepted: 01 January 2010

Revised: 01 September 2009

Received: 01 December 2008

Published in CSUR Volume 43, Issue 4

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Ma ZMondal SChen TZhang HHassan A(2024)VulNet: Towards improving vulnerability management in the Maven ecosystemEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-024-10448-629:4Online publication date: 5-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10664-024-10448-6
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