Supporting Architecture Evolution

The purpose of this work is to identify architectural decisions relevant in cloud-edge environments from the point of view of a software architect and develop a taxonomy of decisions. Based on the taxonomy of decisions a decision support workflow will be created as main contribution of this work to reduce complexity and improved decisions. The workflow is supported by an algorithm for cloud offering ranking based on their QAs. This assists the architect in selecting the best cloud offering for a given component depending on its QA requirements. Finally, the architecture for a decision support system utilizing the workflow and the algorithm for offering ranking is presented. This is the basis for the prototypical implementation which is used for the experimental evaluation with professional software architects in industry.