Master's Thesis - Jiping Xu

Improving the Usability of an Integrated Decision Support System for Design Decision Making

Background

Software architecture is the result of a set of architectural design decisions [1]. The study of architectural design decisions is getting more attention from both academic areas and industrial usages in the recent years. Design decisions provide the abstract to describe architectural knowledge. They involve important choices on core components to satisfy and balance stakeholders’ concerns [2]. There are many benefits of capturing design decisions: lower costs of change, reusability and so on[3]. However, it is difficult to make good design decisions. Architects do not always make rational decisions, and they can be biased[4]. To solve the aforementioned problems, Architecture Management Enabler for Leading Industrial software (AMELIE) is developed to provide a framework for managing architectural design decisions in large software-intensive projects [5].

Motivation

AMELIE is a complex system consists of many components. These components are developed by different people at different time. Some of them are part of theses of students. It is not easy to integrate all the components, which leads to difficulties for the end user. For example, when an architect uses the system, the workflow is unclear. He might not know where to start. Since user experience is essential to the success of a software, this calls for a better User Interface. Other problems could also emerge because of inconsistencies between the components. In this thesis, problems reducing the usability should be solved and the usability should be improved.

Research questions

The following questions should be answered in this thesis:

RQ1: What are the requirements of a decision support system(DSS) for making design decisions?

• A rather new field, various requirements from researchers
• Industry partner - Siemens AG: real-world use cases

RQ2: How to improve the usability of an existing DSS that supports design decision making?

• Usability (end-users)
• Maintainability (developers)
• Understandability (end-users, developers)
• Learnability (end-users, developers)

Approach

To answer the aforementioned research questions, several steps will be carried out as follows:

1. Phase 1: conduct literature review; familiarise with AMELIE; create an artifact: a list of requirements,
2. Phase 2: perform usability test to get end-user feedback about existing AMELIE UI; implement UI changes; integrate systems,
3. Phase 3: create end-user manual; create developer documentation; create API reference.
    

References

[1] Jansen, A., & Bosch, J. (2005). Software architecture as a set of architectural design decisions. In Software Architecture, 2005. WICSA 2005. 5th Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on (pp. 109-120). IEEE.
[2] Zimmermann, O. (2011). Architectural decisions as reusable design assets. IEEE software, 28(1), 64-69.
[3] Tofan, D., Galster, M., Avgeriou, P., & Schuitema, W. (2014). Past and future of software architectural decisions–A systematic mapping study. Information and Software Technology, 56(8), 850-872.
[4] van Vliet, H., & Tang, A. (2016). Decision making in software architecture. Journal of Systems and Software, 117, 638-644.
[5] Bhat, M., Shumaiev, K., & Matthes, F. (2017, September). Towards a framework for managing architectural design decisions. In Proceedings of the 11th European Conference on Software Architecture: Companion Proceedings (pp. 48-51). ACM.