Tracing the Interdependencies between Architecture and Organization in Goal-Oriented Extensible Models

Architectural decisions, such as choosing an appropriate technology or an effective decomposition into subsystems, are interacting with organizational influence factors, e.g.: diverging technology skills of project participants, the structure within development teams or even their geographical distribution. Our goal is to formalize these interdependencies, to detect potential conflicts and to propose solution patterns on both, the organizational and the architectural side. The prerequisite for that is a meta-model which captures the organizational context and supports a bidirectional tracing to architectural elements. The range of architecture-relevant influence factors differs on a project-by-project basis, therefore the meta-model needs to be adaptable. For the given purpose, this work provides a goal-oriented approach. GRL is a suitable notation to model organizational dependency-structures. Architectural deliverables, the means for their realization and the involved contributors, are represented in a three-layered GRL-based basic-model. The project-specific adaption is attained by the utilization of expansion-models which cover particular organizational viewpoints like the aforementioned skill profiles. Our work is based on our experience and exemplary applications in a joint research project and in an ongoing e-commerce project.