The software architecture forms an essential part of a complex software-intensive system. Architecture design decision-making involves addressing tradeoffs due to the presence of economic constraints. The problem is to develop a process that helps a designer choose amongst architectural options, during both initial design and its subsequent periods of upgrade, while being constrained to finite resources. To address this need for better decision-making, we have developed a method for performing economic modeling of software systems, centered on an analysis of their architecture. We call this method the Cost Benefit Analysis Method (CBAM). The CBAM incorporates the costs and benefits of architectural design decisions and provides an effective means of making such decisions. The CBAM provides a structured integrated assessment of the technical and economic issues and architectural decisions. The CBAM utilizes techniques in decision analysis, optimization, and statistics to help software architects characterize their uncertainty and choose a subset of changes that should be implemented from a larger set of alternatives. We also report on the application of this method to a real world case study.
This report is related to the following area(s) of work:
Software ArchitectureTechnical Report
CMU/SEI-2001-TR-035
December 2001
SEI:
Asundi, Jayatirtha; Kazman, Rick; & Klein, Mark. Using Economic Considerations to Choose Among Architecture Design Alternatives (CMU/SEI-2001-TR-035). Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, 2001. http://www.sei.cmu.edu/library/abstracts/reports/01tr035.cfm
IEEE:
J. Asundi, R. Kazman, and M. Klein, "Using Economic Considerations to Choose Among Architecture Design Alternatives," Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Technical Report CMU/SEI-2001-TR-035, 2001. http://www.sei.cmu.edu/library/abstracts/reports/01tr035.cfm
APA:
Asundi, J., Kazman, R., & Klein, M. (2001). Using Economic Considerations to Choose Among Architecture Design Alternatives (CMU/SEI-2001-TR-035). Retrieved May 25, 2013, from the Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University website: http://www.sei.cmu.edu/library/abstracts/reports/01tr035.cfm
CHI:
Asundi, Jayatirtha, Rick Kazman, and Mark Klein. Using Economic Considerations to Choose Among Architecture Design Alternatives (CMU/SEI-2001-TR-035). Pittsburgh, PA: Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, 2001. http://www.sei.cmu.edu/library/abstracts/reports/01tr035.cfm
MLA:
Asundi, J., Kazman, R., & Klein, M. 2001. Using Economic Considerations to Choose Among Architecture Design Alternatives (Technical Report CMU/SEI-2001-TR-035). Pittsburgh: Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University. http://www.sei.cmu.edu/library/abstracts/reports/01tr035.cfm
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