Dealing with uncertainty in early software architecture

Abstract

Changing early architectural decisions of a system is both difficult and costly. It is very important for the architect to get them "right". However, in early design, the architect is often forced to make these decisions under uncertainty, i.e., not knowing the precise impact of those decisions on system's properties (e.g., scalability) as well as stakeholder concerns (e.g., cost). In this paper, we provide an overview of GuideArch, a framework aimed at systematic exploration of the architectural solution space under uncertainty to help with making early architectural decisions.