Naive Architecting - Understanding the Reasoning Process of Students - A Descriptive Survey

Software architecting entails making architecture decisions, which requires a lot of experience and expertise. Current literature contains several methods and processes to support architects with architecture design, documentation and evaluation but not with the design reasoning involved in decision-making. In order to derive a systematic reasoning process we need to understand the current state of practice and propose ways to improve it. In this paper we present the results of a survey that was conducted with undergraduate software engineering students, aiming to find out the innate reasoning process during architecting. The results of the survey are compared to the existing architecture literature in order to identify promising directions towards systematic reasoning processes.