A Decision-Making Technique for Software Architecture Design

The process of making decisions on software architecture is the greatest significance for the achievement of a software system's success. Software architecture establishes the framework of the system, specifies its characteristics, and has significant and major effects across the whole life cycle of the system. The complicated characteristics of the software development context and the significance of the problem have caused the research community to build various methodologies focused on supporting software architects to improve their decision-making abilities. With these efforts, the implementation of such systematic methodologies looks to be somewhat constrained in practical application. Moreover, the decision-makers must overcome unexpected difficulties due to the varying software development processes that propose distinct approaches for architecture design. The understanding of these design approaches helps to develop the architectural design framework. In the area of software architecture, a significant change has occurred wherein the focus has shifted from primarily identifying the result of the architecting process, which was primarily expressed through the representation of components and connectors, to the documentation of architectural design decisions and the underlying reasoning behind them. This shift finally concludes in the creation of an architectural design framework. So, a correct decision- making approach is needed to design the software architecture. The present study analyzes the design decisions and proposes a new design decision model for the software architecture. This study introduces a new approach to the decision-making model, wherein software architecture design is viewed based on specific decisions.