research-article

Architectural decision forces at work: experiences in an industrial consultancy setting

Authors:

Julius Rueckert,

Andreas Burger,

Heiko Koziolek,

Thanikesavan Sivanthi,

Alexandru Moga,

Carsten FrankeAuthors Info & Claims

ESEC/FSE 2019: Proceedings of the 2019 27th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering

Pages 996 - 1005

https://doi.org/10.1145/3338906.3340461

Published: 12 August 2019 Publication History

Get Access

Abstract

The concepts of decision forces and the decision forces viewpoint were proposed to help software architects to make architectural decisions more transparent and the documentation of their rationales more explicit. However, practical experience reports and guidelines on how to use the viewpoint in typical industrial project setups are not available. Existing works mainly focus on basic tool support for the documentation of the viewpoint or show how forces can be used as part of focused architecture review sessions. With this paper, we share experiences and lessons learned from applying the decision forces viewpoint in a distributed industrial project setup, which involves consultants supporting architects during the re-design process of an existing large software system. Alongside our findings, we describe new forces that can serve as template for similar projects, discuss challenges applying them in a distributed consultancy project, and share ideas for potential extensions.

References

[1]

N. B. Harrison, E. Gubler, and D. Skinner. 2016. Architectural Decision-making in Open-Source Systems – Preliminary Observations. In IEEE International Workshop on Decision Making in Software ARCHitecture (MARCH).

Google Scholar

[2]

ISO. 2011. ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010, Systems and Software Engineering: Architecture Description. (2011).

Google Scholar

[3]

J. Jia, P. Zhang, and L. F. Capretz. 2016. Environmental Factors Influencing Individual Decision-making Behavior in Software Projects: a Systematic Literature Review. In ACM International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE).

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[4]

M. Keeling. 2015. Architecture Haiku: A Case Study in Lean Documentation. IEEE Software 32, 3 (may 2015), 35–39.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[5]

P. Kruchten. 2013. Games Software Architects Play. https://resources.sei.cmu. edu/asset_files/Presentation/2013_017_001_47712.pdf

Google Scholar

[6]

C. Manteuffel, D. Tofan, H. Koziolek, T. Goldschmidt, and P. Avgeriou. 2014. Industrial Implementation of a Documentation Framework for Architectural Decisions. In IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture (WICSA).

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[7]

A. Tang, M. Razavian, B. Paech, and T.M. Hesse. 2017. Human Aspects in Software Architecture Decision Making: a Literature Review. In IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA).

Google Scholar

[8]

A. Tang and H. Van Vliet. 2009. Modeling Constraints Improves Software Architecture Design Reasoning. In IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture & European Conference on Software Architecture (WICSA/ECSA).

Google Scholar

[9]

U. van Heesch, P. Avgeriou, and R. Hilliard. 2012. A Documentation Framework for Architecture Decisions. Journal of Systems and Software 85, 4 (apr 2012), 795–820.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[10]

U. van Heesch, P. Avgeriou, and R. Hilliard. 2012. Forces on Architecture Decisions - A Viewpoint. In IEEE/IFIP European Conference on Software Architecture (ECSA).

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[11]

U. van Heesch, V.-P. Eloranta, P. Avgeriou, K. Koskimies, and N. Harrison. 2014. Decision-Centric Architecture Reviews. IEEE Software 31, 1 (jan 2014), 69–76.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

Cited By

View all

Ernst NKlein JBartolini MColes JRees N(2023)Architecting complex, long-lived scientific softwareJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2023.111732204:COnline publication date: 1-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.jss.2023.111732
Bhat MShumaiev KHohenstein UBiesdorf AMatthes F(2020)The Evolution of Architectural Decision Making as a Key Focus Area of Software Architecture Research: A Semi-Systematic Literature Study2020 IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA)10.1109/ICSA47634.2020.00015(69-80)Online publication date: Mar-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSA47634.2020.00015

Index Terms

Architectural decision forces at work: experiences in an industrial consultancy setting
1. Computer systems organization
  1. Architectures
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Designing software

Recommendations

A recommender system for software architecture decision making
ECSA '19: Proceedings of the 13th European Conference on Software Architecture - Volume 2

Making the right design decisions for a software system is a difficult task. Inappropriate design decisions are often hard to reverse and can lead to high costs and a poor quality of the software product. To support architects in the decision-making ...
Sustainable Architectural Design Decisions

Software architects must sustain design decisions to endure throughout software evolution. Several criteria can help them assess decisions' sustainability. In addition, industry and research projects have applied different techniques to make ...
Viability for codifying and documenting architectural design decisions with tool support

Current software architecture practices have been focused on modeling and documenting the architecture of a software system by means of several architectural views. In practice, the standard architecture documentation lacks explicit description of the ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

ESEC/FSE 2019: Proceedings of the 2019 27th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering

August 2019

1264 pages

ISBN:9781450355728

DOI:10.1145/3338906

General Chairs:
Marlon Dumas
University of Tartu, Estonia
,
Dietmar Pfahl
University of Tartu, Estonia
,
Program Chairs:
Sven Apel
Saarland University, Germany
,
Alessandra Russo
Imperial College, UK

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 12 August 2019

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

ESEC/FSE '19

Sponsor:

SIGSOFT

ESEC/FSE '19: 27th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering

August 26 - 30, 2019

Tallinn, Estonia

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 112 of 543 submissions, 21%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

2
Total Citations
View Citations
152
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)11
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0

Reflects downloads up to 21 Sep 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all

Ernst NKlein JBartolini MColes JRees N(2023)Architecting complex, long-lived scientific softwareJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2023.111732204:COnline publication date: 1-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.jss.2023.111732
Bhat MShumaiev KHohenstein UBiesdorf AMatthes F(2020)The Evolution of Architectural Decision Making as a Key Focus Area of Software Architecture Research: A Semi-Systematic Literature Study2020 IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA)10.1109/ICSA47634.2020.00015(69-80)Online publication date: Mar-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSA47634.2020.00015

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Cited By

Index Terms

Recommendations

A recommender system for software architecture decision making

Sustainable Architectural Design Decisions

Viability for codifying and documenting architectural design decisions with tool support