Software Engineering

1.11 
Trade-off analysis
There are numerous approaches for conducting technical, project, and business 
analyses of a situation to gather information to aid decision-making. Cost-benefit 
analysis (CBA) is a systematic process for calculating and evaluating the costs and 
benefits of a proposed action. This analysis serves two purposes: (1) to determine 
if the action is a sound, feasible, and viable undertaking, and (2) to compare it with 
alternate approaches to accomplishing the same purpose. It involves comparing the 
total expected cost of each alternative against the expected benefits to determine 
whether the benefits outweigh the costs and by how much. This technique is useful 
for project-level decisions since they must ultimately be addressed in a monetary 
measure of utility. However, technical decisions require techniques that deal with 
situations where design factors, such as performance or computing resource utiliza-
tion, do not lend themselves to financially based consequences.
Trade-off analysis provides an approach to architectural problem solving and deci-
sion making accompanied by uncertainty. In many situations, technical alternatives 

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