Towards the Integration of Human Factors in Collaborative Decision Making for Secure Architecture Design

Designing a large and complex software system depends not only on the nature of the system itself, but also on human-centric characteristics of the team of architects, developers, and managers involved in the design activity. Each of these team members often comes with varying levels of knowledge, experience, attitudes, and behaviors (i.e., human factors) towards securing systems that impact the decision-making process of the individual team members and of the team as a whole. Thus, these human factors can influence architectural design decisions impacting many different system qualities including security. In this paper, we propose a framework for considering human factors in collaborative decision-making for secure architecture design. At the core of the proposed framework, are conceptual models for security human factors and architectural design decisions. We describe the steps and our preliminary results towards creating the proposed framework using a combination of model-driven engineering techniques and human science approaches. We also provide a simple design scenario to illustrate the envisioned design workflow of the proposed framework. With the proposed framework, we aim to improve our understanding of how decisions are made by a team of diverse members, and to provide better traceability of decisions impacting system security.