Comprehensive Architecture Evaluation and Management in Large Software-Systems

The architecture of a software system is both a success and a failure factor. Taking the wrong architectural decisions may break a project, since such errors are often systematic and affect cross-cutting aspects of the system to be built. Moreover, software projects get more and more challenging due to the rising complexity and dynamics of business processes, large team size and distributed development. As the software architecture is the common platform for many project activities, it constitutes a critical success factor. Thus, a comprehensive method for evaluating a software architecture and propagating important properties of it downstream to code is needed. At sd&m, we designed a comprehensive architecture evaluation and management framework in order to satisfy these needs. In this paper, we derive a list of requirements, such a framework should fulfill. We then present the components of our architecture evaluation method and demonstrate, how it fulfills these requirements.