Um estudo de avaliação e documentação de arquiteturas de software na indústria

Abstract

Usually, the software architect responsible for the software architecture definition and evaluation cannot prioritize which non-functional requirements must be prioritized during the development of their systems. Because of that, failures may happen during the system execution requiring more time and resources to fix them. In many cases, due to the inexperience of architects or the need for rapid deployment of a system, the non-functional requirements are not considered in the software architecture definition phase and its documentation is absent or incomplete, making the software architecture difficult to be understood, modified and envolved by other team members. This work investigates the main strategies and techniques used to document software architectures and to evaluate non-functional requirements by existing software development companies. Our study had the participation of 17 software architects to answer the survey. Our work identified that performance and reliability non-functional requirements are the most important to be addressed by the architecture and even with the existence of some approaches to evaluate architectures, they do not seem to be disseminated and used among architects. The architects judged that in a performance analysis of a software system the most important information to be displayed should be the response time of the system scenarios. Regarding architecture documentation, most interviewees stated that they used some kind of documentation. The use of class diagrams and component diagrams are the most common forms of documentation used by architects. Besides that, we propose a guide to help software architects in the task of achieving such non-functional requirements during the evolution of software systems. The proposed guide prioritizes the non-functional requirement of performance. The logs analysis approach to identify priority scenarios in a performance assessment was pointed out as one of the key contributions of the guide and could facilitate the identification and comparison of the versions of their systems.