Scaling Up Software Architecture Evaluation Processes

As software systems become larger and more decentralized, increasingly cross organizational boundaries and continue to change, traditional structural and prescriptive software architectures are becoming more rulecentric for better accommodating changes and regulating distributed design and development processes. This is particularly true for Ultra-Large-Scale (ULS) systems and industry-wide reference architectures. However, existing architecture design and evaluation processes have mainly been designed for structural architecture and do not scale up to large and complex system of systems. In this paper, we propose a new software architecture evaluation process – Evaluation Process for Rule-centric Architecture (EPRA). EPRA reuses and tailors existing proven architecture analysis process components and scales up to complex software-intensive system of systems. We exemplify EPRA’s use in an architecture evaluation exercise for a rule-centric industry reference architecture.