Suitability of software architecture decision making methods for group decisions

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. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.