Architectural Design Decisions for Systems Supporting Model-Based Analysis of Runtime Events: A Qualitative Multi-method Study

Abstract

Models are popular artefacts in the software development process which promise to improve stakeholder communication and the overall quality of a software system under construction. Recent research proposes that the usefulness of models is not limited only to the software design phase: Empirical evidence indicates that manual analysis of a running system is improved when models are linked to recorded runtime events. However, software architects are confronted with various design decisions when designing a system that yields the required runtime events and correlates them to the model elements they originate from. The contribution of this paper is a taxonomy of architectural design decisions distilled from a series of qualitative studies following a multi-method research study design: We utilized coding techniques from Grounded Theory to build an initial taxonomy from architectural concepts found in the literature, and verified and extended the taxonomy independently by five novice software architects in a practical scenario. The resulting taxonomy captures essential architectural decisions when implementing a system that supports the analysis of its runtime behaviour using models. We then performed initial steps towards a architectural guidance model by applying the taxonomy to another realistic scenario, following the Design Science Research method, in order to analyze the properties and deepen our own technical understanding of the captured concepts in the taxonomy.