A Requirements-Driven and Collaborative Decision Support Approach for Evaluating the Viability of Candidate Implementation Technologies

Platforms, frameworks, and other forms of software assets are proliferating in the industry for well-documented reasons. Architects may choose from a wide variety of implementation technologies to realize their envisioned software architecture. Each asset provides the ability to fulfill a set of requirements, and imposes a set of constraints. Given these complex compatibility relationships, it is a non-trivial task to determine how best to utilize candidate assets toward a defined business problem. This task is made harder when multiple stakeholders from various backgrounds contribute to the decision-making process, as often occurs in large projects.By grouping requirements by functional area, and relating them to corresponding candidate technologies, we propose an approach that allows stakeholders to collaboratively reason about the satisfaction of requirements, the compatibility of technologies, and integration risk. The goal is to narrow the initial space of technologies to a smaller number of viable candidate technology sets.