Risk Appetite in Architectural Decision-Making

This paper is an exploratory study on architects' attitudes towards risk and its influences on the architectural decision-making process. A classification of architects' attitude to risk-taking has been developed on the basis of Fowler's Technical Debt Quadrants. The core proposition of the paper is that the well-established concept of `risk appetite' can be equally well applied to characterise and classify architects' attitudes towards risk. This enables the aspects of the decision-making process that are influenced by architects' attitudes towards risks to be identified, and reveals what these influences are. It has been shown that the proposed classifications reflect many real-world situations.