Organizations: School of Computer Science, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China · Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore
Abstract
Software architecture design is a critical yet inherently complex and knowledge-intensive phase that requires balancing competing quality attributes and adapting to evolving requirements. Traditionally, this process has been time-consuming, labor-intensive, and heavily reliant on architects, often resulting in limited exploration of alternative architectural decompositions and styles, especially under the pressures of agile development. While LLM-based agents have shown promising performance across various software engineering tasks, their application to architecture design remains relatively scarce and requires systematic exploration. To address these challenges, we proposed MAAD (Multi-Agent Architecture Design), a knowledge-driven framework that orchestrates four specialized agents (i.e., Analyst, Modeler, Designer and Evaluator) to autonomously and collaboratively transform requirements specifications into comprehensive, multi-view architectural blueprints with quality attribute assessments. MAAD incorporates RAG to inject recognized architectural standards and patterns into the workflow and leverages a hierarchical memory mechanism that captures design history for iterative refinement. We evaluated MAAD through comparative experiments against MetaGPT, using quantitative architecture-level metrics across 10 case studies and qualitative feedback from industry architects on 10 real-world specifications. Results show that MAAD generates more complete, modular, and traceable architectures than the baseline, and its dedicated Evaluator agent autonomously produces structured quality evaluation reports that significantly reduce manual validation efforts. Furthermore, we found that the quality of the generated architecture heavily depends on the underlying LLM's reasoning capacity, with GPT-5.2 and Qwen3.5 outperforming other models across most evaluation settings.
Multi-agent LLM frameworks are data-intensive systems that govern how agents orchestrate tasks, manage state, and coordinate decisions. These architectural choices control execution overhead, memory behavior, planning effectiveness, and coordination scalability. Their impact on system performance remains poorly understood. Existing benchmarks evaluate individual agent capabilities in isolation and lack standardized framework-level comparison. We make four contributions. We introduce an architectural taxonomy that decomposes multi-agent LLM frameworks along five dimensions: orchestration, memory, planning interfaces, specialization, and communication topology. We develop MAFBench, a unified evaluation suite that integrates existing benchmarks within a standardized execution pipeline. We conduct a controlled empirical study across nine frameworks, fixing the underlying LLM and varying only architectural design choices. We distill the results into six evidence-based design principles. Architectural design, not only model intelligence, governs performance. Orchestration alone increases latency by over 60x, and a minimal implementation of the same paradigm isolates that cost as implementation rather than paradigm. Schema-constrained planning interfaces reduce accuracy by up to 32 points through formatting failures, not reasoning errors. Communication topology drops coordination success from above 90% to below 30% under mismatched structure. Memory architecture controls recall and scalability independent of context window size, and no evaluated framework natively supports controlled knowledge revision.
Automated assessment in software engineering education has advanced significantly for code grading and essay scoring. However, reviewing software architecture deliverables, which requires analyzing structural completeness and requirements traceability, has not yet been fully automated. Applying Large Language Models (LLMs) to this task requires robust architectures to ensure technical feedback is accurate and reliable for students. This paper presents CAPRA (Configurable Architecture Proficiency Report Assessment), a multi-agent LLM system that analyzes software architecture deliverables to generate personalized, template-compliant LaTeX feedback. As a core design choice, CAPRA coordinates multiple specialized agents and employs a Python-based microservice for multi-modal document extraction, utilizing PyMuPDF and vision-enabled LLMs (specifically gpt-4o) to parse text and UML diagrams. To ensure educational reliability and mitigate hallucinations, CAPRA introduces a deterministic Evidence Anchoring step using fuzzy matching via normalized Levenshtein distance, along with a ConsistencyManager agent that cross-verifies, deduplicates, and merges findings. System performance is assessed using a structured eight-criterion binary evaluation taxonomy covering: (i) extraction completeness, (ii) feature validation, (iii) issue grounding and severity detection, (iv) recommendation specificity and traceability, and (v) template and tone compliance. A preliminary empirical evaluation on 10 student reports shows that CAPRA satisfied 88.8% of the evaluated criteria under a strict two-rater aggregation rule, achieved moderate inter-rater agreement with human evaluators (kappa = 0.582), and processed each report in slightly over 4 minutes. While these results support the viability of LLM-supported architectural feedback, human oversight remains essential for subjective assessment dimensions.
Microservice architectures have become dominant for modernizing monolithic systems, yet identifying appropriate services remains challenging and largely manual. Existing decomposition approaches are predominantly code-centric, limiting applicability in early design stages where only textual requirements are available. Despite advances in Large Language Models (LLMs), limited empirical evidence exists on their ability to synthesize complete microservice architectures from natural-language requirements, including service definitions and inter-service interactions. This study investigates whether an LLM can bridge requirements engineering and architectural design, generating architectures solely from textual requirements and evaluating structural agreement and perceived quality of results. We conduct a mixed-method study using OpenAI o3 under zero-shot (ZS) and few-shot (FS) prompting across two systems (Bookstore, PetClinic), one execution per system/condition. Architectures are evaluated through (i) comparison with reference architectures using precision, recall, and F1-score for service identification and communication recovery, and (ii) a blinded expert assessment of correctness, completeness, modularity, and plausibility, plus open feedback synthesis. OpenAI o3 identifies services with higher agreement under FS prompting (F1 = 0.79 for ZS versus = 0.97 for FS). Communication recovery is more challenging: ZS produces dense architectures with high recall but low precision (F1 = 0.61), while FS improves agreement, reaching F1 = 0.82 and reducing unsupported dependencies. Expert evaluation corroborates these results, with FS architectures perceived as more modular, coherent, and plausible than ZS outputs. OpenAI o3 shows potential for requirements-driven synthesis when guided by exemplar prompting. Results are model- and context-specific from two small systems, not model-independent proof.
Danyllo Albuquerque, José Renan, Guillermo Rodríguez +6