Factors affecting architectural decision-making process and challenges in software projects: an industrial survey

Abstract

Software architecture plays a fundamental role in overcoming the challenges of the development process of large-scale and complex software systems. The software architecture of a system is the result of an extensive process in which several stakeholders negotiate issues and solutions, and as a result of this negotiation, a series of architectural decisions are made. This survey study aims to determine the experiences of the software industry experts with respect to architectural decision-making, the factors that are effective in decision-making, and the technical and social problems they encounter. An online questionnaire-based survey was conducted with 101 practitioners. The responses were analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively. Analysis of responses revealed that the majority of the participants prefer to document some or all of the architectural decisions taken and to store these documents in web-based collaboration software. Decisions are usually made by teams of two or three, and discussion-based approaches (brainstorming and consensus) are adopted. In the software architecture decision-making process, “major business impact” is the most challenging situation. Information sharing and keeping track of decisions and decision rationale are areas in need of improvement as identified by most participants. From the participants' feedback and their answers to open-ended questions, we concluded that the software architecture decision-making process has an important role in the industry. Our key findings are that decisions made in the architectural decision-making process are taken by teams and generally all decisions are documented. In projects where decisions are made by a single person, peer pressure is found to be significantly different from pressure in projects where decisions are made by the group. This is an indication that as the number of people in the decision-making process increases, the disagreements also increase.