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- There is a common and often used approach or procedure to investigate alternatives with clear.
- Evaluation and comparison results are recorded.
- The chosen solution and alternatives are reassessed upon changing needs, understanding, issues, obsolescence, technological or architectural advancements.
Notes about selecting alternatives and making choices in general:
- People tend to focus on low hanging fruits: of the shelf ones with perceived minimal risks despite low merits or that have been used before, as considering novel solutions requires much more effort.
- Unnecessary or unneeded optionalities present in one alternative may bias the judgement.
- Need to limit exploration period. Promise of several available and possibly even more undiscovered alternatives may lure us into an endless search. Searching for a silver bullet may reduce the available implementation time. There is a similar situation with two alternatives that are equally attractive, which results in an unreasonable vacillation.
- The comparison may be biased by the contrasts of alternatives (e.g. making one dull mass the other more attractive (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/design-alternatives-madhu-parthasarathy), the comparison is based on a series of (pairwise) per-attribute comparisons (resulting in discarding after being worse in one or a number of collations), and not on the total values (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027714000456).
Documentation development and management
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- Technologies and their analysed characteristics are verified are documented.
- They are periodically reassessed, not just initially.
- The approach used to select and assess technologies: other users and their uses, available appraisals, internal reviews of available options, testing, piloting...
- Common (but also, when needed, optional or custom) requirements, concerns, criteria or characteristics are used for deciding (selection and check): used technologies are suitable, stable, ready for production usage, well, maintained, the community is large, there support, licenses are compatible…
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Management of IPR and dependencies
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