Title
Quantifying the costs and benefits of architectural decisions
Abstract
The benefits of a software system are assessable only relative to the business goals the system has been developed to serve. In turn, these benefits result from interactions between the system's functionality and its quality attributes (such as performance, reliabilty and security). Its quality attributes are, in most cases, dictated by its architectural design decisions. Therefore, we argue in this paper that the software architecture is the crucial artifact to study in making design tradeoffs and in performing cost-benefit analyses. A substantial part of such an analysis is in determining the level of uncertainty with which we estimate both costs and benefits. In this paper we offer an architecture-centric approach to the economic modeling of software design decision making called CBAM (Cost Benefit Analysis Method), in which costs and benefits are traded off with system quality attributes. We present the CBAM, the early results from applying this method in a large-scale case study, and discuss the application of more sophisticated economic models to software decision making.
Year
DOI
Venue
2001
10.1109/ICSE.2001.919103
ICSE
Keywords
Field
DocType
cost-benefit analysis,software architecture,software cost estimation,CBAM,Cost Benefit Analysis Method,architectural decisions,architectural design decisions,architecture-centric approach,business goals,cost benefit analysis,cost-benefit analyses,design tradeoffs,economic modeling,economic models,large-scale case study,quality attributes,software architecture,software design decision making,software system,system functionality,system quality attributes
Software design,Systems engineering,Economic model,Computer science,Parametric polymorphism,Software system,Public policy,Cost–benefit analysis,Software,Software architecture
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
0270-5257
0-7695-1050-7
96
PageRank 
References 
Authors
5.90
3
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Rick Kazman12950404.78
Jai Asundi219913.06
Mark Klein348564.57