Decision Making for the Software Architecture Structure Based on the Criteria Importance Theory

Software architectural decisions have a significant impact on the software development process as well as on the quality of developed software systems. In this paper, the technique that allows selecting the optimal software architecture among several alternatives is proposed. This selection technique is reduced to the criteria importance theory for decision-making problems with a hierarchical criterion structure. For applying it, we need to pick up a set of metrics that assess the characteristics of the software architecture. Next, we need to determine metrics scale and create the hierarchical criterion structure with all the relations between software metric groups. The results allow us making conclusions about usefulness of the proposed technique during architecture design phase for software systems.