Mature Architecting - A Survey about the Reasoning Process of Professional Architects

Architecting is to a large extent a decision-making process. While many approaches and tools exist to support architects during the various activities of architecting, little guidance exists to support the reasoning part of decision-making. This is partly due to our limited understanding of how professional architects make decisions. We report on findings of a survey that we have conducted with 53 industrial software architects to find out how they reason in real projects. The results of the survey are interpreted with respect to the industrial context and the architecture literature. We derive reasoning best practices that can support especially inexperienced architects with optimizing their decision-making process.