TRADITIONALLY, SOFTWARE architects were entrusted with making “decisions that are costly to change.”1 Because these decisions often had to be made early in the project, architects drew on their experience and ability to abstract to get them right. Repeated project cost and timeline overruns have demonstrated, though, that trying to plan all features and decide the system structure early in a pr...

In this paper we introduce a content-oriented scheme for protocol studies of designers and demonstrate its benefit for CAAD research. The structure of the coding scheme is described. We discuss how this method can benefit CAAD research and its differences from the process-oriented method used previously. With this method we analyze data to describe the design process as the combination of senso...

The need to model systems and their different aspects leads to research and development of models which support all views of a system. The growing complexity of the software imposes the use of architectures, not only because we want to build accurate systems, but also because we need to understand them. Separating aspects of different views usually helps us to manage software complexity. The cu...

In the creation of groupware systems, a good design of communication mechanisms, required by the group in order to carry out its work, is essential, since there are many other design aspects that depend on it. These aspects have a major impact on the success or failure of the collaborative application. This paper presents a computer-mediated communication taxonomy for groupware systems, as well...

A central aspect of architectural design is the use of recurring organizational patterns and idioms| or architectural styles [GS93, PW92, MG92, GHJV94]. Examples include generic system organizations such as those based on data ow or layers, as well as speci c organizational structures such as the classical decomposition of a compiler, the OSI communication stack, and the MVC user interface para...

This paper briefly presents an architectural pattern, Adaptability Aspects, for structuring adaptive applications using Aspect-Oriented programming in a specific way. We also evaluate the applicability of this pattern for resource constrained devices. The Adaptability Aspects pattern is intended to improve modularity and reuse when adaptability is required. By providing three versions of the sa...

Building on a formal theory of the structural aspects of organizational change initiated in Hannan, Pólos, and Carroll (2002a, 2002b), this paper focuses on structural inertia. We define inertia as a persistent organizational resistance to changing architectural features. We examine the evolutionary consequences of architectural inertia. The main theorem holds that selection favors architectura...