Explaining Architectural Choices to Non-architects

Explaining and motivating architectural choices are crucial points both in real system development and in computer scientists education. Stakeholders and students should fully understand from a high level perspective the rationale behind basic architectural choices. The paper proposes a communication approach that is complementary to established design processes and can be exploited in workshops that involve the "non-architects" at the end of each phase of an iterative development process. Starting from a problem analysis focused on the significant aspects of data, activities and information flows, a logical architecture is defined by grouping activities into logical components. Different logical architectures are rated according to several conceptual dimensions, in order to highlight their specific rationale and benefits. Finally, deployment solutions are considered to weight the ratings according to costs and constraints of different deployment architectures and of the underlying technologies. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.