A Rationale-based Model for Architecture Design Reasoning

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7.2. An empirical study to validate the AREL model • tools should be available to generate traceability report based on designers’ enquiry. • in order to make full use of AREL, the requirements have to cross-reference design specifications. • there should be keyword search in AREL to find the design rationale, requirements and design. • enable cross-reference of multiple projects sharing similar architecture design. • different types of search results should be shown in different colours to highlight search path. In summary, the responses given by the experts clearly support the retention of design rationale knowledge using the AREL method. The experts see that AREL can help architecture design, verification and maintenance. The experts, however, are concerned with the cost and implementation of AREL. These two issues are related in that the cost can be minimised if suitable and usable tools are available to support the AREL applications. 7.2.5 Limitations During the study, experts employ different techniques to analyse the problems when they were given the design specifications. Some experts would first read the specifications and then discuss the issues, especially for those who had involved in the related design of this system. Others would briefly read the specifications, then make deduction and guesses and seek discussions. The time it took each expert to reach their conclusions vary depending on the techniques as well as personal style. Additionally, the experts were not familiar with the AREL methodology and it took time to explain the AREL diagrams. Therefore, it was found that the time measured vary greatly depending on the familiarity of the expert on this particular aspect of the design. As such, the time cannot be used to gauge how quickly AREL could provide design reasoning compared with traditional design specifications. There are differences in the level of experience between experts on certain subjects. Some experts are more familiar with the software design at the communication level, and some more familiar with the message composition design. In general, all of the experts had provided correct answers to the questions, the level of details in the answers given by the experts varied depending on their level of expertise in that area. Therefore, the usefulness of the AREL is inversely related to how familiar they are to the topic of discussion. The more familiar they are with the subject, the less they have to refer to design specifications or the AREL models. 131
7.3. Summary The case study is specific to a particular industry which requires expertise of someone who understands electronic payment system. This criterion has placed a limitation on who can participate in the empirical study. Random sampling of architects does not apply in this case. Additionally, with a single case study, the claim that a method can be generalised is limited [174, 115]. So we cannot claim that the AREL method can generally benefit all types of architecture design because many more cases are required to reach such a conclusion. However, the validation by the experts does provide limited evidence to support that AREL is potentially beneficial to the understanding of architecture design rationale. 7.3 Summary In this chapter, we have demonstrated how to apply AREL to capture and represent architecture design rationale in a case study. We have used a real-world electronic payment system, the EFT system, as our case study. We have presented various parts of the EFT system design to show how AREL captures architecture design rationale and how they are linked to the motivational reasons and design objects. In order to validate that AREL can be useful in practice, we carried out an empirical study using 9 experts to study the design reasoning of the EFT system. All experts have extensive experience in system design and in payment systems. They were asked questions that required them to use design specifications and other means to reason with the EFT architecture design. Their answers were compared with the architecture rationale captured by AREL. They found that AREL provides a more explicit and direct way to document design rationale. The experts have indicated that AREL is useful in practice and they would use it if tools are available. 132
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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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5.5. Limitations and use design rat
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Page 125 and 126: 7.1. The EFT system reasoning, a co
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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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