A Comprehensive Framework for Architecture Evaluation

Experience and research have shown that the choice of appropriate architectures in the e arly design phases of software-intensive systems has a determinant impact on many of the crucia l qualities of such systems, e.g., maintainability, efficiency, reusability. In addition, early wrong decisions duri g 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 requirement s changes in the future. In large scale software systems qualities such as maintainability ar e primarily determined by architectural decisions. Therefore, it is important to devise a method to assess a rchitectural designs at various levels of detail and during various stages of development, and particularly to design a me thod that will give insight into architectural design decisions in the early stages of a proj ect.