Voyager: Software architecture trade-off explorer

Abstract

Software engineers must ensure that systems under development are endowed with software architectures that enable them to meet their requirements. Apart from functionality, systems also have to satisfy extra-functional requirements that may include behavioural constraints that the software must adhere to, as well as qualities to optimise such as performance, availability, and energy efficiency. These qualities are often inter-dependent and heavily influenced by the structure of the system. This results in poorly understood multi-dimensional design spaces, in which trade-offs among qualities are not evident when making architectural decisions. This paper presents Voyager, a tool which allows engineers to visualise architectural configurations and explore the trade-offs among their quality attributes in a multi-dimensional design space. The tool produces contextual visualisations to facilitate trade-off analysis, providing engineers with a streamlined way of understanding architectural design spaces, using an approach that combines architectural structure with multi-dimensional data visualisations. A user study was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the tool. Results show that participants achieved a significantly higher accuracy in a shorter time span and had a better user experience when using Voyager, with respect to an existing comparable tool.