Session:Architecture Evaluation--Paper Preview
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Risk Themes Discovered Through Architectural Evaluations
Len Bass, Robert Nord, William Wood, David Zubrow
The output of 18 software architecture evaluations are analyzed
to find patterns in the risk themes identified in the evaluations.
The major results are:
• A categorization of risk themes
• The observation that twice as many risk themes are risks of
“omission” as are risks of “commission”.
• A failure to find a relationship between the business and
mission goals of a system and the risk themes from an
evaluation of that system.
• A failure to find a relationship between the domain of a system
being evaluated and the risk themes associated with the
development of that system.
The results of this investigation have application to practitioners
by suggesting activities on which developers should put greater
focus. They also have application to researchers by suggesting
further areas of investigation.
Assessing the architecture of large software-intensive systems using a knowledge-based approach
Christian del Rosso, Alessandro Maccari
This paper presents an assessment case study on the evolutionary capability of a large software system using a knowledge-based approach. The knowledge-based assessment is based on interviews with selected stakeholders of a software system. We have used this to assess the capability of the software architecture to evolve in one large Nokia software system. We have found that this approach proves to be effective in large organizations where development teams are distributed in different time-zones, with cultural differences and with limited person-to person communication. The lessons learned and the advantages of using this approach are presented.
Inside Architecture Evaluation; Analysis and Representation of Optimization Potential
Bastian Florentz
The share of software in embedded systems has been growing permanently in the recent years. Thus, software architecture as well as its evaluation has become an important part of embedded systems design to define, assess, and assure architecture and system quality. Furthermore, design space exploration can be based on architecture evaluation. To achieve an efficient exploration process, architectural decisions need to be well considered. In this paper, analysis of architecture evaluation is performed to uncover dependencies of the quality attributes which are the first class citizens of architecture evaluation. With an explicit representation of such dependencies, valuable changes of an architecture can be calculated. Next to the exploration support, the analysis results help to document architecture knowledge and make architectural decisions explicit and traceable. The development process can now be based on dependable and well documented architectural decisions. Effects of changes become more predictable. Time and costs can be saved by avoiding suboptimal changes.
