Supporting ATAM with a collaborative Web-based software architecture evaluation tool

As software companies are becoming increasingly globalised, a number of issues arise with respect to the social and environmental aspects of conducting the Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method (ATAM), a software architecture evaluation method developed by the Software Engineering Institute. It would be fair to question the applicability of the ATAM to commercial companies. In this paper, we show that there are important issues and potential weaknesses in the ATAM from a social context. We provide suggestions for a means of overcoming these potential pitfalls through the assistance of the ubiquitous Internet. We then describe a tool dubbed ACE (ATAM Collaborative Environment), a Web-based software system that provides a common environment where stakeholders and software evaluators alike can take part in an ATAM evaluation without having to be physically collocated.