Making the right decision: Supporting architects with design decision data

Paper in proceeding, 2013

Software architects are often forced to make design decisions based on limited information. In this paper, we present an approach that allows software architects to study information about design decisions made by hundreds or more software architects by automatically analyzing the version management data of large open-source repositories. The contribution is, first, that it develops a conceptual model to reason about the automatic derivation of specifically medium level architectural design decisions. Second, we show that it is indeed possible to derive these design decisions automatically from open source projects. This provides a basis for statistical and quantitative reasoning about software architecture design decisions that allows software architects to make better-informed decisions.