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Strategy-Focused Architecture Decision Making

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Part of the book series: Embedded Systems ((EMSY))

Abstract

Making architecture investment decisions is challenging as it requires knowing and structurally combining best practices in management, economics, and architecting. This chapter describes a structured approach towards architecture decision making that integrates established management techniques, strategy maps and balanced scorecards, with established architecting practice, scenario and business case analysis. We have named this the Strategy-focused Architecture (StArch) approach. In this chapter, we exemplify each step of StArch using a real-life project at Philips Healthcare. StArch has been evaluated by the practitioners who indicated their satisfaction as well as suggested improvements to the existing decision making process in the organization.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The major identifying details for this case, such as product name, project names, and release naming are replaced with pseudonyms for confidentiality reasons.

  2. 2.

    The provided estimates are proxies of the real estimates in the project.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the people at Philips Healthcare, especially the members of the team, as well as our colleagues Rob van Ommering, Aleksandra Tesanovic, Daniel Borches, Gürcan Güleşir, and Piërre van de Laar for their comments on earlier versions of this chapter.

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Correspondence to Ana Ivanović .

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Ivanović, A., America, P. (2010). Strategy-Focused Architecture Decision Making. In: Van de Laar, P., Punter, T. (eds) Views on Evolvability of Embedded Systems. Embedded Systems. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9849-8_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9849-8_15

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-90-481-9848-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-90-481-9849-8

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