A Rationale-based Model for Architecture Design Reasoning

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7.2. An empirical study to validate the AREL model Traceable Design 1. Design specifications do not connect requirements to design, making it difficult to understand where the requirements come from initially. This lack of traceability in specification means that the designer has to search through the document in order to understand a design. 2. General grouping of requirements for traceability is required. 3. AREL can make explicit hidden relationship and allow architects to verify design with explicit reasoning. 4. AREL presentation is direct and easy to follow. 5. AREL can help architects to focus on a specific part of the design very quickly to start tracing interdependent requirements and design. Design Rationale Support 6. AREL can facilitate the design thought process in a conscious way. 7. AREL provides a structure to apply common sense. 8. AREL enforces a design process in which architects have to justify why they design things in a certain way. 9. AREL can provide a high-level understanding of the system before designers start reading detailed specifications. 10. Architecture design should be at a reasonably high-level and AREL implementation should not go into too much details. 11. AREL provides a methodology to capture the knowledge from the design process through the requirement, design and implementation cycle. Software Development Support 12. AREL provides a development “standard” which ensures that architecture rationale is captured. 13. AREL can highlight design complexity before implementation. This enables architects to have a better understanding of the problem, the associated costs and complexity of the design before committing to development. 14. AREL complements design specifications very nicely. 15. Graphical representation in AREL is useful for showing complex relationship which is hard to trace with textual specifications. 16. AREL facilitates verification by peer review and stakeholders review. 17. AREL is necessary to support maintenance activities in large projects. From the above comments, there are three general areas where the experts have commented positively about AREL: (a) the traceability features in AREL help them understand the system; (b) the design rationale support helps decision making, knowledge 129
7.2. An empirical study to validate the AREL model retention and comprehension; (c) the existence of a design reasoning process generally helps the development and maintenance of software systems. This is a very positive result because it shows that AREL can play an important role in software architecture. On the other hand, the experts have some reservations about the implementation of AREL: • with AREL, architects still need to be thorough with identifying assumptions and constraints or the design might still be inadequate. • the completeness of the design rationale depends on the person doing it. • the recording of the design reasoning would depend on individual author and this is a subjective matter. • the graphical structure of AREL might be hard to manage when the design becomes very complex. • the cost of building the AREL model is uncertain. • cost of updating AREL may be high during the design phase. • the practice needs to be standardised in an organisation so that it is repeatable. • it may not be suitable for small project because the cost cannot be justified. • certain decisions may not be documented deliberately due to politics. Their reservations mainly surround how designers may use AREL and whether AREL would be cost effective. Since this pilot study is a small scale study on a specific system, and the tool used in the study is only a proof-of-concept, the real benefits of AREL’s applications in real-life systems are yet to be proven. Given what has been demonstrated to the experts during the interview sessions, experts were asked how AREL can be improved. A number of suggestions have been made to enhance AREL. The experts indicated that tool implementation is essential in AREL’s application. Therefore, a lot of suggestions focus on how AREL should be implemented. • because of the complexity of architecture design, tool support is critical in its successful implementation. • if a template model for a certain type of design is available in AREL representation, architects can easily use it to adapt to a similar design 130
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A Rationale-based Model for Archite
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maintenance. These techniques can h
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Declaration This thesis contains no
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2.2.6 DoD Architecture Framework .
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5.4.6 Risk assessment in architectu
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8.2 The architecture rationalisatio
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12.2 Contributions . . . . . . . .
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6.10 ≪AR≫ and ≪AAR≫ Stereot
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11.13A Process to Synchronise Chang
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5.13 Design Rationale Helps Evaluat
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that architecture design is highly
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1.2. Research motivations and resea
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1.2. Research motivations and resea
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1.4. Structure of the thesis the ch
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Part I Problem Analysis 10
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2.1. Industry practice of design ra
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2.2. Architecture frameworks and de
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Chapter 3 Related work in design ra
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3.2. Why do we need design rational
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3.2. Why do we need design rational
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3.3. Existing methods for capturing
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3.4. Other related studies 3.3.7 Qu
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3.4. Other related studies evolutio
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3.5. How well design rationale meth
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3.5. How well design rationale meth
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Chapter 4 Research methodology and
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4.1. Software engineering research
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4.2. The chosen research and valida
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Part II Architecture Design Rationa
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on a regular basis. Their inputs ha
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5.1. Architecture rationale in the
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5.2. Survey methodology data collec
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5.3. Survey findings experience). I
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5.3. Survey findings Table 5.1: Fre
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5.3. Survey findings Business Goals
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5.3. Survey findings 5.3.5 Document
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5.3. Survey findings Table 5.8 summ
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5.3. Survey findings We used Spearm
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5.3. Survey findings previous desig
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5.4. Discussion of findings Since t
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5.4. Discussion of findings or cons
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Page 99 and 100: Part III The Representation and App
Page 101 and 102: 6.1. A conceptual model for design
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Page 107 and 108: 6.3. Architecture elements Figure 6
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Page 117 and 118: 6.6. A UML representation of AREL a
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Page 121 and 122: 6.7. AREL usability AE by ≪AEsupe
Page 123 and 124: 6.8. Summary The AREL model is exte
Page 125 and 126: 7.1. The EFT system reasoning, a co
Page 127 and 128: 7.1. The EFT system The processing
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Page 185 and 186: Chapter 10 Architecture decision de
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10.3. Reasoning about change impact
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10.5. Summary design object may cau
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11.1. Capturing architecture design
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11.1. Capturing architecture design
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11.2. Checking AREL models Figure 1
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11.3. Tracing AREL models Figure 11
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11.4. Analysing AREL with BBN • S
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11.5. Limitations Figure 11.13: A P
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Chapter 12 Conclusions 12.1 Summary
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12.2. Contributions reasoning metho
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12.2. Contributions implementations
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12.3. Future work architecture deci
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12.3. Future work to examine the co
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BIBLIOGRAPHY [10] B. W. Boehm, Soft
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BIBLIOGRAPHY [37] A. Eden and R. Ka
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BIBLIOGRAPHY [62] J. D. Herbsleb an
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BIBLIOGRAPHY [89] N. Lassing, D. Ri
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BIBLIOGRAPHY [115] D. L. Parnas,
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BIBLIOGRAPHY [142] Z. Simsek and J.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY [167] W. F. Tichy, N.
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Appendix A AREL Tool User Manual 1
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4.1 AREL Check Model When the Check
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4.2 AREL Model Tracing AREL model t
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Figure 9 - result of downward trace
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To initiate the graph’s creation,
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onto the diagram 14 Assign values t
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Useful Definitions The following ar
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) Some projects only c) Not at all
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19. I revisit architecture design d
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Complaint Procedure If you have any
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Privacy Protection Only investigato
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B. Exploring design reasoning. 1. W
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3. Why does the system use asynchro
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C. General Comments on AREL Modelli
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IEEE Computer Society Press. A. Tan
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