Economics-Driven Software Architecture

Architects regularly make architectural design decisions but are usually unable to evaluate the economic impact of those decisions. Management, in contrast, is often interested in product-level decisions (such as features and quality) but not in the technical details of how those decisions are made. These differing interests lead to inconsistencies between how managers view value and how architects can enable or disable those value propositions through their design decisions. This lack of communication can result in poor decisions. Clearly, it is in the best interests of all project stakeholders to make informed and technically feasible value-driven design decisions. Thus architects need practical, validated tools and techniques for applying economics-driven principles to software architecture. They need these tools and techniques to make better decisions and to better justify those decisions to their stakeholders. Current practices in architecting software systems do not often make economic and strategic considerations explicit. Architectural design decisions tend to be driven by ways that are not connected to, and usually not optimal for, value creation. Factors such as flexibility, time to market, cost, and risk reduction often have high impact on value creation (Sullivan et al., 2001). But the sad reality is that such considerations are seldom included in architectural planning. The state of the practice is that systems are typically designed by thinking about functionality first and considering architecture, if at all, only when problems arise. Such ignorance is in stark contrast to the motivation and objectives of architecture-centric approaches to development and systematic evolution (e.g., model-driven architectures, domainspecific software architectures and product lines, component-based and middleware-induced architectures, etc.), where managing complexity, cost reduction, risk mitigation, evolvability, strategic planning, and long-term value creation are among the major drivers for adopting such approaches. This suggests an urgent need for economics-driven and value-based architectural models and metrics, which can provide the architect with insights into the long-term and strategic viability, cost-effectiveness, and sustainability of the architecture design decisions made (or not made). We believe that these metrics and models should be at the heart of the “architecting” process: inception, elaboration, composition, evaluation and analysis, implementation and deployment,