Model-Based System Architecture, 2nd Edition

21Architecture Assessment

Experienced architects have a certain gut feeling about whether a design is good or bad. Many of the architect's decisions must be made early in the development phase on the basis of assumptions and can, if they have been bad, bring the project to failure. It is often difficult to roll back or revise architecture decisions and their consequences. To put the important architecture decisions on a profound basis, you should do regular assessments of your architectures.

Architecture assessment methods assess the quality of an architecture. It is not an assessment that can be automated and leads to a set of objective performance indicators. Of course, you can support the assessment by scripts or simulations that verify specific aspects of the architecture, but the main part needs the craft of the system architects. It is a balancing act between business goals, technology options, and product management constraints.

The Architecture Trade‐off Analysis Method^SM (ATAM^SM)¹ developed by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at the Carnegie Mellon University is a common architecture assessment method in software engineering [137]. Since it does not focus on specific software technologies, it could also be applied to the systems engineering discipline (for example, Firesmith et al. [78]).

The standard ISO/IEC/IEEE 42030:2019 defines the term “architecture evaluation” as a judgment about an architecture with respect to specified objectives [111]. ATAM is mentioned ...