Towards a Goal-oriented Method for Software Solutions Prioritization.

Architecture practitioners, such as enterprise architects, solutions architects, and application architects are often faced with the problem of selecting the best software solutions that implement the requirements and satisfy the business objectives. Examples of these solutions are: web services, software components, and full software applications. To identify the best solution, architects often have to prioritize the candidate solutions according to a set of criteria, such as their quality attributes, their contributions to satisfy the (business) objectives, and their cost of implementation. This work aims to design a method that helps architects to identify the optimal solution that achieves the requirements and efficiently satisfies the business objectives. The proposed method is composed of three steps. First, it builds a goal model that links each candidate solution to: i) the functional requirements to be implemented and ii) the desired objectives to be satisfied. The goal model uses the Archimate language. It connects the requirements, goals and solutions together according to the Goal-oriented Requirement Language (GRL) rules. Second, the method computes automatically satisfaction scores that measure the effectiveness of each solution. Third, the method prioritizes the solutions according to their satisfaction scores. This work presents the principles underlying the proposed method and discusses its possible application in the practice.