Introducing the Concept of Synthesis in the Software Architecture Design Process

Synthesis is a widely applied problem-solving approach of mature engineering disciplines including the sub-processes of technical problem analysis, identification and composition of solution domain concepts, and alternative-space analysis. Current software development processes do not adopt an explicit synthesis process and as such may fall short in identifying, composing and evaluating the relevant concerns. In order to advance ad hoc software development process to a mature engineering discipline it is necessary to integrate the concept of synthesis in current software engineering processes. In software engineering, software architecture design forms a key artifact including the early design decisions, which embodies the overall structure that impacts the quality of the overall system. For ensuring the quality of software architecture, it is necessary to identify and compose the relevant concerns. For this, we integrate the concept of synthesis in the software architecture design process and present the synthesis-based software architecture design process. This approach differs from existing software architecture design approaches since it explicitly includes the synthesis sub-processes of technical problem analysis, solution domain analysis and alternative space analysis, integrating these in a common process