Toward a Software Architecture Design Method - A Framework for Architecture Design

Software Architecture (SA) design is an essential activity in the development of software systems. According to Kim and Garlan (2010, p. 1216), a strong progress has been reached in software architecture design given that: “today we find growing use of standards, architecture-based development methods, and handbooks for architectural design and documentation”. However, due to the increasing complexity of software systems (Aleti et al., 2013), as well as the, "emerging trends in SA, i.e., Service oriented architecture, Product line architecture, Aspect oriented architecture, and Model driven architecture" (Qureshi et al., 2013), software architecture designs methods, are relevant to be elaborated, studied, documented, used and evaluated. According to Rodríguez et al. (2012, p. 1), “Service-Oriented Software Engineering (SoSE) is a new paradigm of software engineering, which is focused on the design and implementation of service-oriented software systems (SoSS)”. Within this context, we conducted a literature review, in which we found that there are not any software architecture design methods specifically focused on the development of Web-based serviceoriented software systems. The main objective of this research is to define a software architecture design method for Web-based service-oriented software systems. To accomplish this, the research model presented in Figure 1 is proposed, which shows the elements to be taken into account for the design of our method. Such elements are the following: P1. Search and Study Information related to Our Research: This step investigates the background and context of the research problem or need. It identifies and studies the foundations and related studies. P2. Analysis of Area and sub Areas of Knowledge, and related Studies: This step involves studying those design factors (if any) that are deemed to substantially affect the results when applying the method. This step also includes analyzing and classifying relevant information related to our research. P3. Development of Conceptual Framework based on: Systematic Review, architectures and styles following the guidelines used in the Design Science research (Hevner, March, Park & Ram, 2004): In this step, we analize the data obtained from the conceptual framework. P4. Method Development: Here, we construct the design method based on the analysis results of the conceptual framework. P5. Presentation Method to Consultants and experts for! : (i) Firstly, the developed method is presented to a panel of experts for their evaluation. (ii) Secondly, we will carry out a logical argument validation, which “consists in the development of logical arguments, ! evaluate the proposed method using a case example and compare its effectiveness against others software architecture design methods. A group of students of software engineering will use our method and other methods to guide the development of the case example. Then, we will quantitatively evaluate the results obtained by using the different methods. In the case of steps P1, . , P6 of Figure 1, the conceptual research method by Mora (2004) is used. Our current research progress is up to step P3. We are currently addressing step P4.