Group Decision Making in Software Architecture : A Study

[henry muccini]

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.

Still, very little has been done to truly understand how architectural design decisions are made by group of practitioners, what information is documented, the tools used for helping documenting and how conflicts are managed.

In the light of a study we are conducting, we ask for help from software architects in industry, to answer three major research questions:

(RQ1) How do practitioners in the Industry make group decisions while architecting software systems?

(RQ2) Are the group decision-making techniques currently being practiced, in line

with state-of-the-art techniques?

(RQ3) What are the challenges that companies face while making architecture-related

group decisions?

We would appreciate if you could help with this study, by filling in an online questionnaire available at:  http://goo.gl/jJdeAQ

If interested, we will be happy to share with you our further results.

Grazie

Henry