Presentation: "Reflections on a decade of software architectural evaluations"
Track:
Architecture Quality
Time:
Wednesday 11:00 - 12:00
Location:
SAS Dania
Abstract: The Software Engineering Institute has been performing the Architectural Trade Off Analysis Method (ATAM) evaluations for almost a decade and ATAM grew out of earlier efforts that we had been doing in software architectural evaluation. In this talk, I will position ATAM in response to what I consider the fundamental questions about architectural evaluation: what are the criteria for evaluation, who are the participants, how do you focus on the portion of the architecture that satisfies the criteria for evaluation, how do you know what to look for once you have focused, and how are the results presented.
I will also present the results of analyzing data about risks that have been discovered as the output of the ATAMs that the SEI has performed. This data shows, among other things, that an overwhelming majority of the problems discovered through ATAMs fall in the category of omissions - things that the architecture team did not do - rather than the category of commission - decisions made by the architecture team that were incorrect.
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Tutorial: "ATAM - The Architecture Trade Off Analysis Method"
Time:
Thursday 09:00 - 12:00
Location:
SAS Suecia
Abstract: This tutorial will introduce ATAM. ATAM is a nine step method that evaluates software architecture against business drivers and produces a set of risks that a system constructed according to the software architecture may not meet its business drivers. During the execution of an ATAM, business drivers and the software architecture are elicited from project decision-makers. These are refined into scenarios and the architectural decisions made in support of each one. Analysis of scenarios and decisions results in identification of risks, non-risks, sensitivity points, and tradeoff points in the architecture. Risks are synthesized into a set of risk themes, showing how each one threatens a business driver.
The participants in this tutorial should have some familiarity with the basic concepts of software architecture.
Len Bass is a Senior Member of the Technical Staff at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI). He has written two award winning books in software architecture as well as several other books and numerous papers in a wide variety of areas of computer science and software engineering. He has been a keynote speaker or a distinguished lecturer on six continents. He is currently working on techniques for the methodical design of software architectures, to understand how to support usability through software architecture, and to understand the relationship between software architecture and global software development practices. He has been involved in the development of numerous different production or research software systems ranging from operating systems to database management systems to automotive systems.
