Motivations for collaboration in software design decision making

Software design is a result of software design decisions made at different stages of the development process and these decisions are often made collaboratively. As part of an ongoing research project to understand and improve this collaborative process we have interviewed 13 designers about their design processes. In this paper we report on a preliminary analysis of our interview data focusing on why people collaborate around design decisions. We found that designers collaborate to improve their design decisions, save or share decision making effort, and in response to social or organizational work contexts.

I. Introduction

Software design is the result of a series of (often collaborative) decisions made during the development of software [1], [6]. These decisions are made at different design levels ranging from architectural design decisions such as deciding on the architectural style to very low level design decisions such as naming a variable or a function. In this paper, we define Software Design Decision Making (SDDM) as the process of generating a set of alternatives concerning the structure or behavior of a software application, evaluating these alternatives, selecting an alternative among these alternatives, and then assessing the design decision. Software designers often collaborate with others during this process to achieve their goals.