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Preserving The Quality Of Architectural Tactics In Source Code, Mehdi Mirakhorli

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

In any complex software system, strong interdependencies exist between requirements and software architecture. Requirements drive architectural choices while also being constrained by the existing architecture and by what is economically feasible. This makes it advisable to concurrently specify the requirements, to devise and compare alternative architectural design solutions, and ultimately to make a series of design decisions in order to satisfy each of the quality concerns.

Unfortunately, anecdotal evidence has shown that architectural knowledge tends to be tacit in nature, stored in the heads of people, and lost over time. Therefore, developers often lack comprehensive knowledge of underlying architectural design …