A Rationale-based Model for Architecture Design Reasoning

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Chapter 1 Introduction Software engineering has been maturing over the years as increasingly sophisticated methods become available to guide developers. A general progress is the increasing level of abstraction to represent system models and implement them. The purpose is to handle complexity. There are many such examples: the transition from assembly programming to structured programming in high-level languages and then to object-oriented programming, and the transition from program design to software architecture design. Software architecture design provides a high-level abstraction of a system. It is an important area of research in recent years because it lays the structural foundation of a system. It allows designers to visualise that a design is viable and that it would satisfy key requirements. When performing architecture design, architects consider both the technical and non-technical aspects of a system. Aspects such as requirements, project schedule, budget, information technology strategies and design trade-off are only some of the considerations in architecture design. Such diversity of considerations makes it challenging to balance the conflicting interests in an architecture design. The question to address is how architects should organise and tradeoff between a wide range of considerations to provide a quality design. It has been suggested that this aspect is fundamental in architecture design for a system to succeed [47]. For instance, a software architect cannot consider security without ensuring that the performance of the system remains satisfactory. Similarly, an architect cannot design a system without considering the IT budget and the legacy systems that are in place. But different architects have different ideas on how to design based on individual experience and approach. Intuitively, we know that the results and the quality of the architecture design may differ depending on who the architect is. We may prefer to trust a more experienced architect with good track records rather than an inexperienced architect. This highlights a fundamental issue 1
that architecture design is highly dependent on the person who performs it. Therefore, the quality of the architecture design depends on an architect’s experience, knowledge and decision making abilities [169]. Methodologies to support software architecture development have been proposed by many such as [64, 8, 23]. There are also published standards for architecture design and architecture frameworks [70, 164]. Although these methodologies support architecture design, very few prescribe on how architecture design decisions could be made and verified, and as such decision making is largely software architects dependent. Software architects conveniently assume that they make the correct design decisions based on their intuition of the problems and their understanding of the potential solutions. The question of whether an architecture design is the most suitable one is vaguely addressed. For instance, a set of requirements are given to two designers, we cannot predict how similar or different their design and design qualities might be. The differences between two designs might be attributed to how contextual information are interpreted in decision making. Good decisions result in high quality system design and bad decisions result in poor quality design. Therefore, design decision is an important aspect in architecture design. Argumentation-based design rationale methods have been proposed to capture design deliberations [93, 99, 97]. These methods have provided the initial research in design rationale. Despite their efforts, there is little evidence that they have been adopted by the software industry. Some have argued that these methods do not effectively capture and communicate design rationale for practical use [139, 132]. But mostly design rationale are not captured at all or they are not captured in a way that could be used effectively. Without a systematic way to elicit and represent design rationale, the knowledge and the understanding of the architecture design can be eroded over time [119, 11]. Furthermore, the documentation of design rationale as evidence to support architecture design is usually not mandated, making it difficult to review and evaluate architecture design. Such erosion of architecture design rationale has a number of implications on software development. The understanding of a design can diminish over time and cannot be shared across the organisation. As a result, architecture design cannot be justified, validated and maintained easily. On the other hand, systematic capture of design rationale can provide much insights into the architecture design, thereby supporting evaluation, verification, traceability and maintenance of complex systems. Without design rationale, maintainers could find it difficult to understand the design when the underlying assumptions, constraints and tradeoffs are missing, and the design reasoning of the architecture cannot be traced. 2
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Page 3 and 4: maintenance. These techniques can h
Page 5 and 6: Declaration This thesis contains no
Page 7 and 8: 2.2.6 DoD Architecture Framework .
Page 9 and 10: 5.4.6 Risk assessment in architectu
Page 11 and 12: 8.2 The architecture rationalisatio
Page 13 and 14: 12.2 Contributions . . . . . . . .
Page 15 and 16: 6.10 ≪AR≫ and ≪AAR≫ Stereot
Page 17 and 18: 11.13A Process to Synchronise Chang
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Page 23 and 24: 1.2. Research motivations and resea
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Page 27 and 28: 1.4. Structure of the thesis the ch
Page 29 and 30: Part I Problem Analysis 10
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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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6.2. Architecture Rationale and Ele
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6.2. Architecture Rationale and Ele
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6.3. Architecture elements Figure 6
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6.4. Architecture rationale Figure
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6.4. Architecture rationale • ris
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6.4. Architecture rationale depicts
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6.5. The extended AREL To prevent c
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6.6. A UML representation of AREL a
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6.6. A UML representation of AREL a
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6.7. AREL usability AE by ≪AEsupe
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6.8. Summary The AREL model is exte
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7.1. The EFT system reasoning, a co
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7.1. The EFT system The processing
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7.1. The EFT system not chosen beca
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7.1. The EFT system Figure 7.5: Int
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7.1. The EFT system sequence checki
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7.1. The EFT system Figure 7.7: Dec
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7.1. The EFT system Therefore, in a
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7.1. The EFT system Figure 7.10: De
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7.2. An empirical study to validate
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7.3. Summary The case study is spec
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8.1. Background Based on these assu
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8.2. The architecture rationalisati
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8.3. Other applications of ARM As d
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8.3. Other applications of ARM Figu
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8.3. Other applications of ARM area
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Chapter 9 Architecture rationale an
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9.1. Background 9.1 Background In t
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9.2. Traceability of architecture r
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9.4. AREL and eAREL traceability ap
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Chapter 10 Architecture decision de
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10.1. Background 10.1.2 Introductio
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10.2. Building a BBN to represent a
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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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A Rationale-based Model for Architecture Design Reasoning

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