The GRADE taxonomy for supporting decision-making of asset selection in software-intensive system development

Abstract Context The development of software-intensive systems includes many decisions involving various stakeholders with often conflicting interests and viewpoints. Objective Decisions are rarely systematically documented and sporadically explored. This limits the opportunity for learning and improving on important decisions made in the development of software-intensive systems. Method In this work, we enable support for the systematic documentation of decisions, improve their traceability and contribute to potentially improved decision-making in strategic, tactical and operational contexts. Results We constructed a taxonomy for documentation supporting decision-making, called GRADE. GRADE was developed in a research project that required composition of a common dedicated language to make feasible the identification of new opportunities for better decision support and evaluation of multiple decision alternatives. The use of the taxonomy has been validated through thirty three decision cases from industry. Conclusion This paper occupies this important yet greatly unexplored research gap by developing the GRADE taxonomy that serves as a common vocabulary to describe and classify decision-making with respect to architectural assets.