A Controlled Experiment on Team Meeting Style in Software Architecture Evaluation

Abstract

Software architecture change can have a major impact on product and project quality. Software architecture evaluation systematically investigates architecture variants with respect to their quality attributes, e.g., modifiability and maintainability of a software system. Scenarios and system properties are key elements to focus architecture evaluation on most likely future changes in the software architecture. Scenario elicitation processes typically include individual scenario brainstorming and a team meeting of all relevant stakeholders to create an aligned list of important scenarios. A major research question is which meeting style, face-to-face meetings, nominal (i.e., non-communicating) teams, or distributed tool-supported team meetings are most effective. In this paper we report on a controlled experiment investigating the meeting style of scenario brainstorming processes. Major result is that face-to-face meetings outperformed in the experiment tool-supported meetings in finding more important scenarios.

Contributors

Dietmar Winkler

Stefan Biffl

Conference

Publication date: April 2010

Publication date (Print): April 2010

Pages: 1-10

Affiliations

Institute of Software Technology and Interactive Systems

Vienna University of Technology, Austria

Favoritenstrasse 9-11/188, 1040 Vienna, Austria

Article

DOI: 10.14236/ewic/EASE2010.13

Copyright statement: © Dietmar Winkler et al. Published by BCS Learning and Development Ltd. 14th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE), Keele University, UK

License:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Conference name: 14th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE)

Conference acronym: EASE

Conference number:

Conference location: Keele University, UK

Conference date: 12 - 13 April 2010

Conference sponsor: Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC)

Conference theme: Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering

Product

Product Information: 1477-9358BCS Learning & Development

Self URI (article page): https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14236/ewic/EASE2010.13

Self URI (journal page): https://ewic.bcs.org/

Categories

Series title: Electronic Workshops in Computing