Making Architecture Optimization Transparent with Tactic-Based Explanations
Andres Diaz-Pace and
David Garlan.
In Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA 2022), 12-15 March 2022.
Online links:   Plain Text
Abstract
| Over the past decade, a number of automated techniques
and tools have been developed for optimizing architectural
designs with respect to quality-attribute goals. In these systems,
the optimization process is typically seen as a black box, since it
is not possible for a human to have access to the decisions that led
to a particular solution generated by an optimization tool. Even
when these decisions are available for inspection, the amount of
information can be overwhelming for the architect. As a result,
humans might not completely understand the rationale behind
a given solution or trust that a tool made correct decisions. To
mitigate this problem, we propose a semi-automated approach
for generating textual explanations for any architectural solution
produced by a tool. This kind of explanation provides a summary
of the key architectural tactics that were applied to achieve an
optimized architecture that satisfies a set of quality-attribute objectives.
In this paper, we discuss two procedures for determining
the key tactics to be explained. As an initial experiment, we used a
popular optimization tool to generate solutions and explanations
for a small but non-trivial design space involving performance,
reliability, and cost objectives. We also performed an exploratory
user study to assess the effectiveness of these explanations. |
Keywords: Explainable Software, Software Architecture.
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