An Integrated Approach of AHP-GP and Visualization for Software Architecture Optimization: A case-study for selection of architecture style

Software Architecture has emerged as an important sub-discipline of software engineering. A key aspect of the design of any software is its architecture styles, i.e. components and connectors and their relationships. Selecting the best style is difficult because there are multiple factors such as project risk, corporate goals, limited availability of resources, etc. Therefore this study presents a methodology for selection of software architecture styles. In this paper we explore the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) within a zero-one goal programming (ZOGP) model for selection of architecture styles. AHP is applied to the decision problem involving multiple alternatives and criteria and aims at selecting an alternative from a known set of alternatives. Then Goal programming model is used to optimize the objective function while simultaneously satisfying all the constraints. Further, AHP-GP Visualization framework and visualization tool (SAVE Tool) are applied to evaluate the selected software architecture style.