Automated decision support for recurring design decisions considering non-functional requirements

Abstract

Planning high quality software means more than regarding functionality. Considering non-functional requirements, implementing them and understanding their effects on the software architecture remain often an open question. Therefore, in this paper, we present an approach that provides decision support in a software development process for recurring design decisions in the field of non-functional requirements. The approach defines a design decision model that allows to encapsulate the reasoning of design decisions, make them reusable and use them to enable automated feedback in a decision making process. At the end, this approach increases the developer's productivity by reusing design decisions and therefore allows to implement requirements with lower overhead and to improve the architecture quality by a tool assisted decision support process.