Evaluation Approaches for Software Architectural Documents: a Systematic Review

Due to the importance of software architectural documents, its review became a fundamental activity for the success of software projects and for the software quality improvement. Software architecture evaluation is a subject that has been intensively studied by diverse research groups. However there is a lack of formal reviews aiming at identifying the existence of software evaluation approaches. The bibliographical reviews that have been accomplished can not be audited or repeated, making them entirely dependent upon the researchers for the obtained results, which could introduce bias on the research results. To prevent these limitations, this paper describes a systematic review aiming at the identification of existing architectural evaluation approaches. Based on the result of this review, we summarize the main characteristics, advantages and limitations of the identified evaluation approaches and propose the requirements for a checklist based software architectural documents evaluation approach.