Factors influencing industrial practices of software architecture evaluation: an empirical investigation

  • Authors:

  • Muhammad Ali Babar;Len Bass;Ian Gorton

  • Affiliations:

  • Lero, University of Limerick, Ireland;Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University;Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

  • Venue:
  • QoSA'07 Proceedings of the Quality of software architectures 3rd international conference on Software architectures, components, and applications
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

To support software architecture evaluation practices, several efforts have been made to provide a basis for comparing and assessing evaluation methods, document various best practices, and report the factors that may influence industrial practices. However, there has been no study to explore the experiences and perceptions of architects for determining the factors that influence architecture evaluation practices in a wide range of organizations. Hence, there is little empirically founded knowledge available on the factors that influence the industrial practices of software architecture evaluation. The goal of this paper is to report the results of an empirical study aimed at gaining an understanding of different factors involved in evaluating architectures in industry. The results of this study shed light on the factors that influence architecture evaluation practices based on the experiences and perception of architects who regularly evaluate architectures of various sizes of applications. It also discusses some of the strategies that practitioners apply to deal with the influence of the identified factors.