Architecture Evaluation

Intro

• Design decisions, patterns are used because of the effects they have on the system.
• Hence, these choices are analysable.
• Design must be evaluated continuously during the life cycle, especially early on.
• There are many benefits to evaluation:
  • Financial.
  • Early detection of problems.
  • Captured rationale - Documented design rationale is important so that implications of modifications can be assessed.
  • Validation of requirements - opens up the requirements themselves for discussion. e.g. conflicting requirements.
  • Improved architectures.

• Use scenarios as vehicles for asking probing questions about how the arch. responds to various situations.
• Propose scenarios against a quality attribute.
• For e.g. against performance - give usage profiles that stretch the system.

SAAM

• Software Architecture Analysis Method.
• Steps:

1. Develop scenarios
2. Describe candidate architecture
3. Classify scenarios - direct (arch directly support) or indirect.
4. Perform scenario evaluations - For each indirect scenario, changes to the architecture that are necessary for it to support the scenario.
5. Reveal scenario interaction - When 2 or more indirect scenarios require change to a single component - they are said to interact in that component. Areas of high scenario interaction

can indicate poor separation of concerns in a system component.

1. Overall evaluation : Tabulation, weighting of scenarios, rating architecture support. To compare candidate architectures.

ATAM

• Architectural Tradeoff Analysis Method.
• ATAM is a refinement of SAAM.
• ATAM reveals how well an architecture satisfies particular quality goals.
• Recognises that an arch. decision tends to affect more than one quality attribute and provides insight into how quality goals trade-off against each other.

Participants in ATAM

• Evaluation team - Group is external to the project whose arch. is being evaluated. Should be competent, unbiased outsiders.
• Project decision makers - Speak on behalf of the project or have authority to make changes to it. The architect must always be included.
• Architecture stakeholders - Developers, Testers, Users, Maintainers. They are needed to articulate the specific quality attribute goals.

Outputs of ATAM

• A concise presentation of the architecture. Requirement is to be concise - so that it is understandable.
• Articulation of business goals.
• Quality requirements in terms of a collection of scenarios.
• Mapping of architectural decisions to quality requirements.
• A set of identified sensitivity and trade-off points.
• A set of risks and non-risks.
• A set of risk themes.