Multiple Criteria Decision Making for the Structural Organization of Software Architecture

Architectural decisions have a significant impact on the development process as well as on the quality of applied systems. On the other hand, it would be desirable to rely on mature solutions and proven experience when making such decisions. Partially this problem could be solved with the use of architectural patterns. Such solution for the same task can be implemented using different sets of patterns. As a result, there is a problem of choosing and evaluating the software architecture that is build using a number of patterns and that meets the system requirements. In this paper, the technique that allows selecting the optimal software architecture for applied software is proposed. This selection technique is reduced to the criteria importance theory problem. For applying it, we need to pick up a set of metrics that assess the characteristics of the software architecture. Next, we need to determine metrics scale and information about their importance. The results allow us making conclusions about usefulness of the proposed technique during architecture design phase for applied software.