Recommended Best Industrial Practice for Software Architecture Evaluation

Architectural decisions have a great impact on the consequent quality of software systems. As a result, it is important to evaluate how a software architecture meets its quality demands. Though much focus has been placed on modeling and describing the software architecture as a design artifact, we found that relatively little is known about the current experience with software architecture evaluation. This report details the results of two workshops on software architecture evaluation, held at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) on November 9-10, 1995 and May 9-10, 1996. The purpose of the workshops was to determine the state of industrial practice in the evaluation of software architectures with respect to a set of desired quality attributes, and to uncover recommendations for best practices. In this report, we summarize the findings of the two workshops, define a set of dimensions to characterize various software architecture evaluation techniques, and make concrete recommendations for implementing architecture evaluation practices.