Software Designers Satisfice

The software architecture community has advocated design rationale in the last decade. However, there is little knowledge of how much reasoning is performed when software design judgments are made. In this study, we investigated the amount of design reasoning performed before making a decision. We recruited 32 students and 40 professionals to participate in this software architecture design study. We found that most subjects needed only a few reasons before making their decisions. They considered that giving a few reasons were good enough to judge despite that more reasons could be found. This result shows a satisficing behavior in design decision making. We explore the implications of this common behavior on software architecture design.