A Pattern Language for Architecture Assessments of Service-oriented Enterprise Systems

The SOA Innovation Lab – an innovation and research network of industry leaders in Germany and Europe investigates the practical use of service-oriented enterprise systems. Current state of practice approaches for assessing maturity of service-oriented enterprise software architectures were intuitively developed, having sparse metamodel or pattern foundation and being rarely validated. This is a real problem for practical architecture assessments in repeatable cyclic evaluations of base architectures of service-oriented systems, which are based on recurring patterns for analysis of continuously growing services over the time. In our research we have developed an original pattern language for supporting architecture assessments and optimization of enterprise systems, leveraging and extending base frameworks like the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) and The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF), and considering additionally similar related work models of architecture maturity. We have deduced our original architecture quality assessment and optimization pattern language from our special designed architecture maturity framework. We have applied our architecture assessment pattern language in consecutive cyclic assessment workshops with global vendors of serviceoriented platforms.