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Abstract:

Experience and research have shown that the choice of appropriate architectures in the early design phases of software-intensive systems has a determinant impact on many of the crucial qualities of such systems, e.g., maintainability, efficiency, reusability. In addition, early wrong decisions during architectural design are in general difficult and costly to change during subsequent stages of development. Furthermore, during software acquisition processes (e.g., outsourced development), it is important to assess the extent to which the software acquired will be appropriate. For example, it is frequently important to know how easily software will accommodate likely requirements changes in the future. In large scale software systems qualities such as maintainability are primarily determined by architectural decisions. Therefore, it is important to devise a method to assess architectural designs at various levels of detail and during various stages of development, and particularly to design a method that will give insight into architectural design decisions in the early stages of a project. A repeatable method is necessary to make such an assessment as objective as possible and to facilitate the evolution and refinement of the method. Such a method must provide a consistent framework regardless of the architecture representations used and of the granularity of the architectural information available, so that it is defined upon consistent concepts and principles in all situations.

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