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Suitability of Software Architecture Decision Making Methods for Group Decisions

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Book cover Software Architecture (ECSA 2014)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 8627))

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Abstract

Software architecture design decisions are central to the architecting process. Hence, the software architecture community has been constantly striving towards making the decision-making process robust and reliable to create high-quality architectures. Surveys of practitioners has demonstrated that most decisions made by them are group decisions. Hence, for any tool or method to be useful to them, it must include provision for making group decisions.

In this paper we analyse if and how current software architecture decision-making techniques support Group Decision Making (GDM). We use an evaluation framework with eight criteria, identified by the GDM community, to evaluate selected SA decision-making techniques in order to check their adequacy and suitability to support group decisions. As per our analysis, most of the selected methods in their current form are not yet fully suitable for group decision making and may need to integrate more aspects like provision for stakeholders to explicitly indicate their preferences, conflict resolution mechanisms, and group decision rules meant to specify how stakeholders’ preferences are taken into account.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Amrita School of Business, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, India

    Smrithi Rekha V.

  2. Center for Research in Advanced Technologies for Education (CREATE), Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, India

    Smrithi Rekha V.

  3. Department of Engineering, Computer Science, and Mathematics, University of L’Aquila, Italy

    Henry Muccini

Authors
  1. Smrithi Rekha V.
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  2. Henry Muccini
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Groningen, The Netherlands

    Paris Avgeriou

  2. Research Group Software Architecture, University of Vienna, Austria

    Uwe Zdun

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Rekha V., S., Muccini, H. (2014). Suitability of Software Architecture Decision Making Methods for Group Decisions. In: Avgeriou, P., Zdun, U. (eds) Software Architecture. ECSA 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8627. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09970-5_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09970-5_2

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-09969-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-09970-5

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