Scenario-Based Architecting with Architecture Trace Diagrams

Designing a software architecture requires a lot of effort. Functional and quality requirements need to be considered in relation to each other and balanced in order to define viable architectural abstractions that support them. Architects usually rely on their intuition and experience to create and choose between architecture alternatives. The viability of a decision can be checked by evaluating the architecture only after it has been created. In this paper, we propose an approach for creating architectural alternatives more directly from the requirements, enabling the evaluation of design decisions even before an architecture exists. We use architecture trace diagrams (ATDs) to model the interplay of components involved in the execution of business processes. We show how the shape, semantics and annotated characteristics of the ATDs can be used to derive architectural decisions, reducing the effort for the documentation of their rationale.