A Rationale-based Model for Architecture Design Reasoning

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8.1. Background Figure 8.1: Key Activities in Architecture Design outcomes, i.e. the elicited business and functional requirements, are inputs into the architecture design process. • Requirements refinement stage - architects and designers gather architecture related information such as technical environment, information strategies and project environment. This information is analysed and refined with respect to the functional requirements. Any implicit assumptions about the requirements are clarified and documented at this stage. • Architecture design stage - architects and designers create the high-level architecture design by using refined requirements as inputs. • Detailed design stage - based on the architecture design, designers produce detailed design and program specifications. Since detailed designs usually are not concerned with the fundamental structure of the system, they are outside the scope of the architecture design process. Depending on the development approach, the activities in an architecture life-cycle may take place in different orders. Examples are waterfall, iterative and agile methodologies. However, the relationship between these activities are still relevant. The arrows between the generic activities indicate the inherent relationships between the products within each stage. For instance, elicited requirements are inputs into the architecture design process and yet the architecture design process could change the requirements. Thus, the development process from requirements elicitation to detailed design has a feedback loop where the activities are influential in a bidirectional way (see Figure 8.1). Similar discussion can be found in software engineering texts such as [146]. Some researchers argue that early-phase requirements modelling and reasoning support can facilitate the requirements elicitation and refinement cycle [175, 108]. Some researchers propose methodologies to tightly relate requirements in the architecture process [56, 130]. But requirements might still change when design constraints or unclear requirements are uncovered in the downstream development process. Such modifications to requirements may be unavoidable because the issues are not obvious previously. The 135
8.2. The architecture rationalisation method scope of architecture design is thus required to cover requirements refinement as well as architecture design. Using general software engineering design principles, we examine how architects and designers make design decisions. As discussed in [171], decision analysis deals with uncertainties. An architect deals with uncertainties by collecting evidence, analysing the possible outcomes and seeking ways to minimise such uncertainties in a design. During this process, an architect would attempt to find all viable design options, i.e. eliminating options that are not viable. Then the architect would try to select a design that maximises the benefits and minimises the risks and costs. In other words, the architect would try to get the best values out of an architecture design and at the same time to ascertain that the design is achievable. Such acts by designers are reported in our survey (see Chapter 5) where architects agree that costs, benefits and risks are important elements in design decision making. The ARM method is an attempt to make this intuitive mental process explicit in the architecture design process. 8.2 The architecture rationalisation method The Architecture Rationalization Method (ARM) is a method to help architects make design decisions during the architecture process. ARM uses the AREL structure to represent the architecture design and the architecture rationale. The outcomes of ARM is an AREL model. The reason for having ARM is to provide a method to guide software architects in their approach to development. Using the rationale-based approach, requirements and architecture design may influence each other through causal effects. The ARM method provides three focal points to help assess these effects: cost, benefit and risk. These focal points can be integrated with a development process in reasoning with a design. An architect can use ARM together with other development methods such as iterative, prototyping or agile. ARM supports them in the decision making realm by using qualitative and quantitative rationale. The two types of architecture design activities we focus on are: • Requirements Refinement - an architecture design process often leads to the refinement of functional requirements due to conflict resolutions or requirements clarifications. Architecture design clarifies and defines non-functional requirements or quality of services such as system reliability and performance. Refining or defining functional and non-functional requirements takes place when contemplating an architecture design. A functional requirement may have implications on, say, the 136
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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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Part III The Representation and App
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6.1. A conceptual model for design
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10.3. Reasoning about change impact
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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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