Architectural Decisions in e-Services Design
Olaf Zimmermann · Techniques and Applications for Mobile Commerce · 2008
The design of e-services requires software architects to analyze many domain-specific requirements; the required architectural decisions recur. Many of them are motivated by cross-cutting concerns such as security, transactionality, and reliability. The decision making is driven by many forces; no single design fits all purposes. Some of these concerns can be expressed as model-and code-level aspects; others are better tackled by more conservative implementation practices. In this talk, we present architectural decision modeling as an emerging technique to transform such architectural knowledge from tacit, tribal knowledge into an explicit, manageable form. We present a three-step decision making framework, which supports the semi-automatic identification of decisions in requirements models and the injection of decisions into model and code aspects. We outline a reusable decision model for service-oriented architecture and e-services design, currently being harvested from completed projects. We conclude with a call to action for further research.