An industrial study on building consensus around software architectures and quality attributes

Abstract

When creating an architecture for a software system it is important to consider many aspects and different sides of these aspects at an early stage, lest they are misunderstood and cause problems at later stages during development. In this paper, we report from an industry study to understand and select between different architecture candidates. The company uses a method that focuses discussions of architecture candidates to where there are disagreements between the participating domain experts. The results indicate that the used method pinpoints for the company where further investigations are necessary and that the decision concerning which architecture to use is taken with more confidence as a result of the focused discussions.