Framework for engineering design systems architectures evaluation and selection: case study

Engineering companies face the challenge of developing complex Engineering Design Systems. These systems involve huge financial, people, and time investments within an environment that is characterised by continuously changing technologies and processes. Systems architecture provides the strategies and modelling approaches to ensure that adequate resources are spent in developing the possible To Be states for a target system. Architecture selection and evaluation involves evaluating different architectural alternatives with respect to multiple criteria, hence an Architecture Evaluation Framework which evaluates and down selects the appropriate architectures solutions is crucial to assess how these systems will deliver value over their lifetime, and where to channel the financial and human investments to maximize benefit delivered to the business’ bottom line. In this paper, an evaluation and selection architecture framework is proposed, which targets to maximise the alignment of Engineering Design Systems with business goals based on a quality centric architecture evaluation approach. The framework utilised software Quality Attributes as well as SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, Threat) and PEST (Political, Economic, Social, Technological) analyses to capture different viewpoints related to technical, political and business context. The framework proposed employing AHP (Analytical Hierarchy Process) to quantitatively elicit relationships between Quality Attributes trade-offs and architectural characteristics. The framework was applied to a real case study considering five Engineering Design Systems alternative architectures, where workshops with subject matter experts and stakeholders were held to reach an informative decision, that maximise architectural quality, whilst maintaining business alignment

An Industrial Study on Building Consensus Around Software Architectures and Quality Attributes

When creating an architecture for a software system it is important to consider many aspects and different sides of these aspects at an early stage, lest they are misunderstood and cause problems at later stages during development. In this paper, we report from an industry study to understand and select between different architecture candidates. The company uses a method that focuses discussions of architecture candidates to where there are disagreements between the participating domain experts. The results indicate that the used method pinpoints for the company where further investigations are necessary and that the decision concerning which architecture to use is taken with more confidence as a result of the focused discussions

An Industrial Study on Building Consensus Around Software Architectures and Quality Attributes

When creating an architecture for a software system it is important to consider many aspects and different sides of these aspects at an early stage, lest they are misunderstood and cause problems at later stages during development. In this paper, we report from an industry study to understand and select between different architecture candidates. The company uses a method that focuses discussions of architecture candidates to where there are disagreements between the participating domain experts. The results indicate that the used method pinpoints for the company where further investigations are necessary and that the decision concerning which architecture to use is taken with more confidence as a result of the focused discussions