The Decision View's Role in Software Architecture Practice

Software development has to deal with many challenges-increasing system complexity, requests for better quality, the burden of maintenance operations, distributed production, and high staff turnover, to name just a few. Increasingly, software companies that strive to reduce their products' maintenance costs demand flexible, easy-to-maintain designs. Software architecture constitutes the cornerstone of software design, key for facing these challenges. Several years after the "software crisis" began in the mid-1970s, software architecture practice emerged as a mature (although still growing) discipline, capable of addressing the increasing complexity of new software systems.