Toward a Framework for Evaluating Heterogeneous Architecture Styles

Abstract

Evaluating architectures and choosing the correct one is a critical issue in software engineering domain, in accordance with extremely extension of architecture-driven designs. In the first years of defining architecture styles, some special quality attributes were introduced as their basic attributes. After a moment, by utilizing them in practice, some results were obtained confirming some of attributes; some others meanwhile were not witnessed. As software architecture construction process is dependent on and addressed by both usage conditions and quality attributes, in this paper a framework has been proposed to provide an environment and a platform that can cover evaluation of architecture styles with a technique that not only exploits both qualitative and quantitative information but also considering users' needs is possible precisely and with high quality. Moreover, we define a classification and notation in order to describe heterogeneous architectures. It provides us with the ability of evaluating heterogeneous architecture styles of a software system.