Using stakeholder preferences to make better architecture decisions

N Ernst, J Klein, G Mathew… - 2017 IEEE International …, 2017 - ieeexplore.ieee.org
2017 IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture …, 2017ieeexplore.ieee.org
A roadmap to modernize the architecture of an existing system must satisfy many strongly-
positioned stakeholders and satisfy the constraints of continuing business operations as the
plan is implemented. Our previous work reported on a method to engage with stakeholders
to model architecture options for a modernization roadmap. These models have proven to
be too large to analyze all options manually: Ad hoc approaches must be employed to prune
the space of possible solutions, which risks dropping optimal solutions. We report here on a …
A roadmap to modernize the architecture of an existing system must satisfy many strongly-positioned stakeholders and satisfy the constraints of continuing business operations as the plan is implemented. Our previous work reported on a method to engage with stakeholders to model architecture options for a modernization roadmap. These models have proven to be too large to analyze all options manually: Ad hoc approaches must be employed to prune the space of possible solutions, which risks dropping optimal solutions. We report here on a method that efficiently collects stakeholder preferences about architecture options and uses an automated search-based optimization approach over the full solution space to identify the most important architecture decisions, i.e., the decisions that have the most influence on stakeholder satisfaction.
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