Skip to main content
We gratefully acknowledge support from the Simons Foundation, member institutions, and all contributors. Donate
arXiv logo
Cornell University Logo

Computer Science > Software Engineering

arXiv:2309.14164 (cs)
[Submitted on 25 Sep 2023]

Title:What rationales drive architectural decisions? An empirical inquiry

Authors:Klara Borowa, Rafał Lewanczyk, Klaudia Stpiczyńska, Patryk Stradomski, Andrzej Zalewski
View PDF
Abstract:Architectural decision-making is a crucial concern for researchers and practitioners alike. There is a rationale behind every architectural decision that motivates an architect to choose one architectural solution out of a set of options. This study aims to identify which categories of rationale most frequently impact architectural decisions and investigates why these are important to practitioners. Our research comprises two steps of empirical inquiry: a questionnaire (63 participants) and 13 interviews. As a result, we obtained a set of rationales that motivated architects' decisions in practice. Out of them, we extracted a list of software quality attributes that practitioners were the most concerned about. We found that, overall, architects prefer to choose solutions which are familiar to them or that guarantee fast software implementation. Mid-career architects (5 to 15 years of experience) are more open to new solutions than senior and junior practitioners. Additionally, we found that most practitioners are not concerned about the quality attributes of compatibility and portability due to modern software development practices, such as the prevalence of using specific standards and virtualisation/containerization.
Subjects: Software Engineering (cs.SE)
Cite as: arXiv:2309.14164 [cs.SE]
  (or arXiv:2309.14164v1 [cs.SE] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2309.14164

Submission history

From: Klara Borowa [view email]
[v1] Mon, 25 Sep 2023 14:18:51 UTC (967 KB)
Full-text links:

Access Paper:

  • View PDF
  • TeX Source
  • Other Formats
view license
Current browse context:
cs.SE
< prev   |   next >
new | recent | 2023-09
Change to browse by:
cs

References & Citations

export BibTeX citation

Bookmark

BibSonomy logo Reddit logo

Bibliographic and Citation Tools

Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?)
Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?)
Litmaps (What is Litmaps?)
scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?)

Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article

alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?)
CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?)
DagsHub (What is DagsHub?)
Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?)
Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?)
Papers with Code (What is Papers with Code?)
ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?)

Demos

Replicate (What is Replicate?)
Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?)
TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?)

Recommenders and Search Tools

Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?)
CORE Recommender (What is CORE?)

arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.

Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)