Automatic Validation of Design Decision Based on Multiple Analysis Methods Integration

The definition of design decision helps architect with explicit design space exploration and improved trace ability from requirement, software architecture to implementation. In this paper, we proposed an automatic design decision validation method. We first extend the design decision meta-model to record the evaluation criterion, impact scope, and analysis methods for software requirement. Our evaluation algorithm analyzes change impact and prepares analysis input for each affected quality requirement. The evaluation process is automatically executed based on an analysis method integration framework. If a quality requirement cannot be fulfilled by relevant design decisions, our search algorithm will explore the design spaces to locate possible conflicted design decisions. We implement our approach by extending a design decision modeling tool ABC/DD, and use our approach to validate a web based interactive application for TV.