Economic Decision-Making for Architectures

There is often a lack of connection between how executives and managers define and foresee value and how architects enable or disable those value propositions through their design decisions. This lack of effective communication causes the partnership between architects and executives to be a weak one. Opportunities are often missed where the architect may not only serve, but also inform executives on value-driven design decisions. This information exchange is particularly critical when the business needs to deal with architecture evolution and uncertainty. Currently architects and project managers simply do not have the tools to rigorously consider the implications of software architecture decisions with respect to multiple quality attributes, and with respect to potentially uncertain future market conditions. In this talk I will discuss two methods for improving the analysis of (and communication of) economic issues related to architectures: the Cost-Benefit Analysis Method (CBAM), which was developed to guide an architect in making software architecture choices; and Architecture Planning for Evolution, which takes CBAM-like reasoning and applies it to a time-series of envisioned changes, as a means of planning for and optimizing the choices over a long time period.