Architectural requirements prioritization and analysis applied to software technology evaluation
Karen Smiley, Qingfeng He, Elizabeth Kielczewski, Aldo Dagnino · 2009
In this short paper, we summarize an industrial project in which we developed and applied the Attribute Hierarchy-based Evaluation of Architectural Designs (AHEAD) method for selecting a software technology to form the basis for the next-generation architecture of a complex commercial software application. AHEAD leverages the Software Engineering Institute's Attribute-Driven Design (ADD) method and the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) for evaluating software technologies that have important architectural impact. The core activities of AHEAD include elicitation, prioritization, and analysis of architectural requirements. The goal of these requirements activities was to establish and apply objective criteria for selecting, prototyping, and evaluating software technology alternatives. We found that using AHEAD brought greater objectivity to prioritization of architectural requirements and to the technical judgments of the software technology options.