Quality-Attribute-Based Economic Valuation of Architectural Patterns
Architects must often make architectural design decisions but are typically unable to evaluate their economic impact. Management is often interested in product-level decisions (such as features and quality) but not in the technical details of how those decisions are achieved. These differing interests can lead to inconsistencies between how executives and managers define and foresee value, and how architects can enable or disable those value propositions through their design decisions. This lack of effective communication results in a weak partnership between architects and executives, resulting in missed opportunities to make informed and technically feasible valuedriven design decisions. This information exchange is particularly critical when an organization must plan for architecture evolution in the face of uncertain future business and mission goals. Since software engineering artifacts exist to serve the business goals of an enterprise, optimizing the value of software systems is a central concern of software engineering [Boehm 2000].
Equipping software architects with the ability to reason about value will provide them with the vocabulary and rationale needed to articulate the value-driven impact of architectural decisions to management.
Ipek Ozkaya, Rick Kazman and Mark Klein
http://www.sei.cmu.edu/publications/documents/07.reports/07tr003.html
200707 governance software economics