Enriching Architecture Knowledge with Technology Design Decisions

Abstract

Decision-making is at the core of software architecture design. However, in order for the architect to take the right design decisions, assistance is required for exploring the architectural knowledge, which encompasses the various architectural solutions, their relationships and distinctions. In the past decades, the number of available technology options has increased significantly, while existing architecture knowledge approaches support technology decisions by representing relations between the different technology solutions, as well as design problems. However, they do not differentiate the candidate technologies according to their offered qualities and drawbacks. Our main goal in this exploratory study is to understand how technology solutions are being considered by the architects during the design process, and how can we enhance existing architecture knowledge concepts to support technology decision making. Our contribution in this paper is differentiating the different technology solutions' features based on a set of architecturally significant aspects, to facilitate considering technologies during the architecture design decisions. In addition, we proposed an extension for existing architecture knowledge models, which characterise the technology design decisions, and their reasoning. We evaluated our results through real examples from practitioners. Moreover, we conducted interviews with experts to validate our proposed concepts.