A Framework for Classifying and Comparing Software Architecture Evaluation Methods

Software architecture evaluation has been proposed as a means to achieve quality attributes such as maintainability and reliability in a system. The objective of the evaluation is to assess whether or not the architecture will lead to the desired quality attributes. Recently, there have been a number of evaluation methods proposed. There is, however, little consensus on the technical and non-technical issues that a method should comprehensively address and which of the existing methods is most suitable for a particular issue. This paper presents a set of commonly known but informally described features of an evaluation method and organizes them within a framework that should offer guidance on the choice of the most appropriate method for an evaluation exercise. In this paper, we use this framework to characterise eight SA evaluation methods.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: ASWEC
• Authors: Muhammad Ali Babar, Liming Zhu, D. Ross Jeffery
• Keywords: ASWEC 2004, Evaluation, Evaluation Methods, Quality Attributes, Software Engineering