An Approach to Software Architecture Evaluation with the 4+1 View Model of Architecture

Software architecture captures early design decisions, which have a major impact on the quality of the developed software. Thus, we can understand the ability of an architecture with its quality attributes by finding the decisions and reasoning about them in the early life cycle. This paper presents an approach helping us to perform successfully the works for architecture evaluation. In our approach, the 4+1 view model of architecture are used with UML during the process of evaluation. Also, it is divided into three main areas of activities: the work of preparing, executing, and completing evaluation. Through this division of works, three main works necessary to evaluate an architecture, i.e. a preliminary work of the inputs to architecture evaluation, a work for finding design decisions and reasoning about them, and a work for organizing evaluation results, can be distinctly performed. In addition, we show the practical applicability and effectiveness of our evaluation approach via an example, which has already been extensively applied in the research literature.