Architecture Design From the Perspective of Human Cognitive Needs

Software architectures are useful, in part, because they use the appropriate level of abstraction to support the design of complex systems. Software architecture research has quickly evolved to the degree that design environments have been implemented to support software architects in creating new designs. We report on a software architecture design environment named Argo that differs from other approaches by paying attention to the human, cognitive needs of software architects, as much as to the representation and manipulation of the architecture itself. We emphasize the primary considerations by contrasting the human cognitive design process to the systems-oriented software design process. Human-centered features in Argo focus on the application of critics for providing design feedback, design processes for supporting critics, and multiple architectural perspectives for aiding human designers. INTRODUCTION Much attention in software engineering research today is focused on the use of software architectures in design [1, 2, 15, 24]. The major motivation is that software architectures provide the appropriate level of abstraction to support the design and understanding of complex systems. Furthermore, paralleling the research in software reuse, the research in software architectures has the potential of yielding high quality products with minimal effort. The research has quickly reached the point where design environments have been implemented to support software architects in creating new designs by combining components within architectural styles. For example, Garlan and colleagues have explored the design environment component requirements for