Software Architecture Design Reasoning

Despite recent advancements in software architecture knowledge management and design rationale modeling, industrial practice is behind in adopting these methods. The lack of empirical proofs and the lack of a practical process that can be easily incorporated by practitioners are some of the hindrance for adoptions. In particular, the process to support systematic design reasoning is not available. To rectify this issue, we propose a design reasoning process to help architects cope with an architectural design environment where design concerns are cross-cutting and diversified. We use an industrial case study to validate that the design reasoning process can help improve the quality of software architecture design. The results have indicated that associating design concerns and identifying design options are important steps in design reasoning.