Criteria for the Evaluation of Implemented Architectures
This joint study of the TU Delft and SIG reports on a concrete list of 15 system attributes which influence the maintainability of an implemented architecture. The list is the result of an empirical study involving over 40 Software Risk Assessment reports, and is used as a starting point to develop a light-weight software architecture evaluation method.
Criteria for the Evaluation of Implemented Architectures
by Eric Bouwers (SIG), Joost Visser (SIG) and Arie van Deursen (TU Delft)
Published in Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM 2009), September 20-26, 2009, Edmonton, Canada.
Abstract: Software architecture evaluation methods aim at identifying potential maintainability problems for a given architecture. Several of these methods exist, which typically prescribe the structure of the evaluation process. Often left implicit, however, are the concrete system attributes that need to be studied in order to assess the maintainability of implemented architectures.
To determine this set of attributes, we have performed an empirical study on over 40 commercial architectural evaluations conducted during the past two years as part of a systematic "Software Risk Assessment". We present this study and we explain how the identified attributes can be projected on various architectural system properties, which provides an overview of criteria for the evaluation of the maintainability of implemented software architectures.
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