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A Framework for Design Tradeoffs

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Abstract

Designs almost always require tradeoffs between competing design choices to meet system requirements. We present a framework for evaluating design choices with respect to meeting competing requirements. Specifically, we develop a model to estimate the performance of a UML design subject to changing levels of security and fault-tolerance. This analysis gives us a way to identify design solutions that are infeasible. Multi-criteria decision making techniques are applied to evaluate the remaining feasible alternatives. The method is illustrated with two examples: a small sensor network and a system for controlling traffic lights.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Denver, USA

    Anneliese Andrews

  2. Amazon.com, Seattle, WA, USA

    Ed Mancebo

  3. Department of Communications Systems, Lund University, Sweden

    Per Runeson

  4. Department of Computer Science, Colorado State University, USA

    Robert France

Authors
  1. Anneliese Andrews
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  2. Ed Mancebo
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  3. Per Runeson
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  4. Robert France
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Anneliese Andrews.

Additional information

Dr. Anneliese Amschler Andrews is Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Denver. Before that she was the Huie Rogers Endowed Chair in Software Engineering at Washington State University. Dr. Andrews is the author of a text book and over 130 articles in the area of Software Engineering, particularly software testing and maintenance.

Dr. Andrews holds an MS and PhD from Duke University and a Dipl.-Inf. from the Technical University of Karlsruhe. She served as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. She has also served on several other editorial boards including the IEEE Transactions on Reliability, the Empirical Software Engineering Journal, the Software Quality Journal, the Journal of Information Science and Technology, and the Journal of Software Maintenance. She was Director of the Colorado Advanced Software Institute from 1995 to 2002. CASI's mission was to support technology transfer research related to software through collaborations between industry and academia.

Ed Mancebo studied software engineering at Milwaukee School of Engineering and computer science at Washington State University. His masters thesis explored applying systematic decision making methods to software engineering problems. He is currently a software developer at Amazon.com.

Dr. Per Runeson is a professor in software engineering at Lund University, Sweden. His research interests include methods to facilitate, measure and manage aspects of software quality. He received a PhD from Lund University in 1998 and has industrial experience as a consulting expert. He is a member of the editorial board of Empirical Software Engineering and several program committees, and currently has a senior researcher position funded by the Swedish Research Council.

Robert France is currently a Full Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Colorado State University. His research interests are in the area of Software Engineering, in particular formal specification techniques, software modeling techniques, design patterns, and domain-specific modeling languages. He is an Editor-in-Chief of the Springer journal on Software and System Modeling (SoSyM), and is a Steering Committee member and past Steering Committee Chair of the MoDELS/UML conference series. He was also a member of the revision task forces for the UML 1.x standards.

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Andrews, A., Mancebo, E., Runeson, P. et al. A Framework for Design Tradeoffs. Software Qual J 13, 377–405 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-005-4252-z

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