Comparison of scenario-based software architecture evaluation methods

Abstract

Software engineering community has proposed several methods to evaluate software architectures with respect to desired quality attributes such as maintainability, performance, and so on. There is, however, little effort on systematically comparing such methods to discover similarities and differences between existing approaches. In this paper, we compare four well known scenario-based SA evaluation methods using an evaluation framework. The framework considers each method from the point of view of method context, stakeholders, structure, and reliability. The comparison reveals that most of the studied methods are structurally similar but there are a number of differences among their activities and techniques. Therefore, some methods overlap, which guides us to identify five common activities that can form a generic process model.