Abstract As society's reliance on software systems escalates over time, so too does the cost of failure of these systems. Meanwhile, the complexity of software systems, as well as of their designs, is also ever‐increasing, influenced by the proliferation of new tools and technologies to address intended societal needs. The traditional response to this complexity in software engineering and software architecture has been to apply rationalistic approaches to software design through methods and tools for capturing design rationale and evaluating various design options against a set of criteria. However, research from other fields demonstrates that intuition may also hold benefits for making complex design decisions. All humans, including software designers, use intuition and rationality in varying combinations. The aim of this article is to provide a comprehensive overview of what is known and unknown from existing research regarding the use and performance consequences of using intuition and rationality in software design decision‐making. To this end, a systematic literature review has been conducted, with an initial sample of 3909 unique publications and a final sample of 26 primary studies. We present an overview of existing research, based on the literature concerning intuition and rationality use in software design decision‐making and propose a research agenda with 14 questions that should encourage researchers to fill identified research gaps. This research agenda emphasizes what should be investigated to be able to develop support for the application of the two cognitive processes in software design decision‐making.

Cobbler’s children do not wear shoes. Software engineers build sophisticated software but we often cannot find the needed information and knowledge for ourselves. Issues are the amount of development information that can be captured, organizing that information to make them useable for other developers as well as human decision-making issues. Current architectural knowledge management systems cannot handle these issues properly. In this paper, we outline a research agenda for intelligent tools to support the knowledge management and decision making of architects. The research agenda consists of a vision and research challenges on the way to realize this vision. We call our vision on-demand architectural knowledge systems (ODAKS). Based on literature review, analysis, and synthesis of past research works, we derive our vision of ODAKS as decision-making companions to architects. ODAKS organize and provide relevant information and knowledge to the architect through an assistive conversation. ODAKS use probing to understand the architects’ goals and their questions, they suggest relevant knowledge and present reflective hints to mitigate human decision-making issues, such as cognitive bias, cognitive limitations, as well as design process aspects, such as problem-solution co-evolution and the balance between intuitive and rational decision-making. We present the main features of ODAKS, investigate current potential technologies for the implementation of ODAKS and discuss the main research challenges.

Despite past efforts, we have little understanding and limited research efforts on how architects make decisions in the real-world settings. It seems that software architecture researchers make implicit assumption that decision making by software architects can be a rational and prescribed process. Such an assumption is disputed in other fields such as economics and decision research. This paper studies the current state of software architecture decision making research in terms of human behaviors and practice. We carried out a literature review on software architecture decision making. We classified papers into decision making behavior and decision making practice and identified the research relationships between them. We found that decision making is a mental activity. Research into the behavioral aspects of software architecture decision making for incorporation into architectural design practices is required. We suggest three research topics on human aspects to improve software architecture practices.

We theorize a two-mind model of design thinking. Mind 1 is about logical design reasoning, and Mind 2 is about the reflection on our reasoning and judgments. The problem solving ability of Mind 1 has often been emphasized in software engineering. The reflective Mind 2, however, has not received much attention. In this study, we want to find out if Mind 2, or reflection, can improve design discourse, a prerequisite of design quality. We conducted multiple case studies with 12 student groups, divided into test groups and control groups. We provided external reflections to the test groups. No reflections were given to the control groups. We analyzed the quality of the design discourse in both groups. We found that reflection (Mind 2) improves the quality of design discourse (Mind 1) under certain preconditions. The results highlight the significance of reflection as a mean to improve the quality of design discourse. We conclude that software designers need both Mind 1 and Mind 2 to obtain a higher quality design discourse, as a foundation for a good design. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

When Service Orientation was introduced as the solution for retaining and rehabilitating legacy assets, both researchers and practitioners proposed techniques, methods, and guidelines for SOA migration. With so much hype surrounding SOA, it is not surprising that the concept was interpreted in many different ways, and consequently, different approaches to SOA migration were proposed. Accordingly, soon there was an abundance of methods that were hard to compare and eventually adopt. Against this backdrop, this paper reports on a systematic literature review that was conducted to extract the categories of SOA migration proposed by the research community. We provide the state-of-the-art in SOA migration approaches, and discuss categories of activities carried out and knowledge elements used or produced in those approaches. From such categorization, we derive a reference model, called SOA migration frame of reference, that can be used for selecting and defining SOA migration approaches. As a co-product of the analysis, we shed light on how SOA migration is perceived in the field, which further points to promising future research directions. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

SUMMARY Many companies have legacy assets to be integrated or modernized. Like today's software developments, migration projects are faced with steadily increasing demands for efficiency: migration has to be carried out faster, better, and cheaper. At the same time, migration complexity increases, and migration projects remain challenging despite the companies' extensive experience. To cope with such efficiency demands, companies need a well‐defined migration strategy. In previous work, we have defined such a migration strategy called lean and mean strategy. In this paper, following technical action research, we apply our migration strategy, and evaluate it, in two large industrial case studies in the field of data migration. The use of the strategy in our case studies reveals the benefits of lean and mean strategy for meeting the efficiency demands. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Software designers constantly mediate with various stakeholders, agree with requirement engineers and interact with coders. Software design is a socially-intensive activity. Teaching software design should be equally socially-intensive. However academic courses still lack a beneficial balance between theory, practice and social engagement. This paper provides details on how we address this problem in our course on software design. The course is designed to engage students with real-life projects and using peer-review sessions within collaborative team clusters. These instruments embed the social conditions of software design within the students' learning process. We show the effectiveness of the course by discussing student evaluations.

Modeling variability is a key aspect of variability management in software product families. Product line architecture (PLA) is one of the major assets of a product line, from which individual product architectures are derived. Consequently, modeling variability in architecture becomes an issue worthy of consideration. In this paper, we propose a variability modeling method which is specifically devised for the component and connector (C&C) view of architecture. We use UML 2 as the architecture modeling language. Modeling solutions are proposed and classified based on the type of variable element and the techniques used to realize variability. We have also studied the ways to avoid cluttering the view when including variability. An example case is utilized to clarify different aspects of our proposed method.