Methods and techniques for software architecture evaluation

In the previous chapter we presented the main concepts related to software product line architecture. In order to deride whether an architecture fulfils the quality requirements, it needs to be evaluated. In this chapter we will discuss a number of different approaches to architecture evaluation that we have found to be useful. The content of this chapter represents a surveillance study on the software architecture analysis methods. The role of the study is to put all these approaches in the same perspective by reviewing the state of art and practice in the research domain. Generally, methods include a predefined and organized collection of techniques. In this perspective, we considered that it is important to present the classification of the evaluation techniques available at the architecture level, in the first part of this chapter. The remainder of the chapter deals with the survey on the existent analysis methods. Different viewpoints that these methods reflect on the evaluation of the quality of so ftware architecture make it very difficult to define a common framework of presentation. We will discuss the analysis methods trying to look for 1) their progress towards refinement over the time, 2) their main contributions, and 3) advantages obtained by using them. The discussion about the selected methods is focused on 1) discovering differences and similarities between eight available methods, and 2) making classifications, comparisons and appropriateness studies. At the end of this surveillance work, we will draw some conclusions of the real level of the current research as well as the future work in this domain area defined by the presented methods. This study represents an important step towards defining a strategy for an analysis of software product line architecture.