Architectural decision forces at work: experiences in an industrial consultancy setting
Abstract
The concepts of decision forces and the decision forces viewpoint were proposed to help software architects to make architectural decisions more transparent and the documentation of their rationales more explicit. However, practical experience reports and guidelines on how to use the viewpoint in typical industrial project setups are not available. Existing works mainly focus on basic tool support for the documentation of the viewpoint or show how forces can be used as part of focused architecture review sessions. With this paper, we share experiences and lessons learned from applying the decision forces viewpoint in a distributed industrial project setup, which involves consultants supporting architects during the re-design process of an existing large software system. Alongside our findings, we describe new forces that can serve as template for similar projects, discuss challenges applying them in a distributed consultancy project, and share ideas for potential extensions.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{Rueckert-al:FSE19,
author = {Julius Rueckert and
Andreas Burger and
Heiko Koziolek and
Thanikesavan Sivanthi and
Alexandru Moga and
Carsten Franke},
title = {Architectural decision forces at work: experiences in an industrial consultancy setting},
booktitle = {{ESEC/SIGSOFT} {FSE}},
pages = {996--1005},
publisher = {{ACM}},
year = {2019},
}