Towards quantitative metrics for architecture models

Software architectures and their representations in models are instrumental in achieving sustainability and the fulfillment of requirements. In this context, sustainability encompasses cost efficient maintainability and evolvability, which are central concerns for long living software systems. Hence, it is of great importance to support an architect in addressing these concerns when designing and evolving architectures. However, there is no framework available in which a designed architecture can be evaluated against these important quality attributes. In this paper, we address this challenge by proposing seven metrics which characterize the completeness, consistency, correctness and clarity of the documentation. These seven metrics should enable an architect to efficiently identify issues in an architecture model.