An empirical study of groupware support for distributed software architecture evaluation process

  • Authors:

  • Muhammad Ali Babar;Barbara Kitchenham;Liming Zhu;Ian Gorton;Ross Jeffery

  • Affiliations:

  • Empirical Software Engineering, National ICT Australia, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia;Empirical Software Engineering, National ICT Australia, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia;Empirical Software Engineering, National ICT Australia, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia;Empirical Software Engineering, National ICT Australia, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia;Empirical Software Engineering, National ICT Australia, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Systems and Software - Special issue: Selected papers from the 11th Asia Pacific software engineering conference (APSEC 2004)
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Software architecture evaluation is an effective means of addressing quality related issues early in the software development lifecycle. Scenario-based approaches to evaluate architecture usually involve a large number of stakeholders, who need to be collocated for face-to-face evaluation meetings. Collocating a large number of stakeholders is an expensive and time-consuming exercise, which may prove to be a hurdle in the wide-spread adoption of disciplined architectural evaluation practices. Drawing upon the successful introduction of groupware applications to support geographically distributed teams in software inspection, and requirements engineering disciplines, we propose the concept of distributed architectural evaluation using Internet-based collaborative technologies. This paper presents a pilot study used to assess the viability of a larger experiment intended to investigate the feasibility of groupware support for distributed software architecture evaluation. In addition, the results of the pilot study provide some preliminary findings on the viability of groupware-supported software architectural evaluation process.