Architectural Design Group Decision-Making in Agile Projects

Software architecture has many definitions. One widely accepted definition of software architecture is that it is a composition of a set of architectural design decisions. Hence, designing a software architecture is a decision-making process. Agile methods drastically changed the way of designing a software architecture. In projects using agile methods (e.g. Scrum), making architectural design decisions is not the responsibility of a single person, but rather the whole development team. Despite the popularity of such methods in the industry, little research exists on how to make these decisions from the perspective of a group effectively. Current techniques usually focus on the identification of quality attributes and design alternatives, not addressing the whole decision-making process. The quality of decisions directly reflects the quality of the software architecture. Therefore poor decisions lead to bad software architectures. In this paper, we discuss current research on group decision-making in software architecture and the proposal of a combination of concepts from two architecture definition methods into a single approach that can be used in agile projects and addresses the most critical concerns of group decision-making. This proposal is part of a master's research project.