Improving decision making and reuse in software systems using Domain Specific reference Architectures

Software Engineering has evolved over many years but stays human centric as it relies significantly on the technical decisions made by humans. Modeling the problem statement and arriving at the architecture and design revolves in the minds of software architects and designers. Many of the decisions stays in architect's minds and are only present in the models. The abstraction structures in software design are deeper than in other disciplines, since the final design is program code. This distinction leads to software architecture and design a highly interwoven process. The early design decisions are otherwise termed architectural decisions which compose software architecture. The architectural decisions are at an intermediate abstraction level with higher probability of reuse, but still not effectively reused even within the same organization. The most effective cases of reuse in software is with architecture patterns and design patterns. The paper points to the fact that patterns are successfully reused due to the quality of the descriptions which include problem, solution pair and supporting example. The paper focuses on intra-organizational reuse, based on Domain Specific Software Architectures and the descriptions containing domain model, decision trees, architectural schema and rationale. It further tries to analyze three different use cases in the light of these elements and analyze if major hindrance of reuse is `Rationale of decisions not well understood' than the commonly stated `Not Invented here', supported with a survey of software engineers.