Abstract
Visualization of architectural design decision (ADD) and its rationale, as a kind of traceability information, is supposed to facilitate the understanding of architecture design and the reasoning behind the design rationale, which is supposed to improve the architecting process and gets better architecture design results. But the lack of empirical evaluation that supports this statement prevents industrial practitioners from using ADD visualization in their daily architecting activities. In this paper, we conducted a controlled experiment to investigate how visualization of ADD can improve the understanding of architecture design by using Compendium, an open source tool for rationale visualization. The preliminary results show that visualization of ADD and its rationale does not increase the total time for reading architecture document (including visualization diagrams of ADDs) plus designing task, and it improves the understanding of architects on existing architecture design with better new design results.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Proc. of the 5th ECSA 2011 - Companion Volume |
Subtitle of host publication | Workshop on Traceability, Dependencies and Software Architecture, TDSA 2011, 1st International Workshop on Software Architecture Variability, SAVA 2011 |
Publisher | Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) |
ISBN (Print) | 9781450306188 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2011 |
Externally published | Yes |
Event | 5th European Conference on Software Architecture, ECSA 2011 - Workshop on Traceability, Dependencies and Software Architecture, TDSA 2011, 1st International Workshop on Software Architecture Variability, SAVA 2011 - Essen, Germany Duration: 13 Sep 2011 → 16 Sep 2011 |
Conference
Conference | 5th European Conference on Software Architecture, ECSA 2011 - Workshop on Traceability, Dependencies and Software Architecture, TDSA 2011, 1st International Workshop on Software Architecture Variability, SAVA 2011 |
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Country/Territory | Germany |
City | Essen |
Period | 13/09/11 → 16/09/11 |
Keywords
- Architectural design decision
- Controlled experiment
- Design decision visualization
- Design rationale
- Software architecture