How modeling methods affect the process of architectural design decisions: a comparative study

A number of modeling methods have been proposed and practiced for the analysis process of software development. As many modeling methods cover the design process as well, it would be natural to ask how those methods affect the critical decisions made during the transition phase from the analysis to the architectural design, but there is little research tackling this problem. The reasons might be the difficulties of finding an appropriate approach and comparison framework. We analyze a set of case studies that treat a common example problem and use a formal method to clarify critical design issues. The paper reports some significant results obtained by the analysis of example problem solutions, based on a formally described comparison framework.