Development of an intelligent system for architecture design and analysis [software architecture]

Software architecture plays a pivotal role in allowing an organization to meet its business goals, in terms of the early insights it provides into the system, the communication it enables among stakeholders, and the value it provides as a re-usable asset. Unfortunately, designing and analyzing architecture for a certain system is recognized as a hard task for most software engineers, because the process of collecting, maintaining, and validating architectural information is complex, knowledge-intensive, iterative, and error prone. The needs of software architectural design and analysis have led to a desire to create tools to support the process. This paper introduces an intelligent system, which serves the following purposes: to obtain meaningful nonfunctional requirements from users; to aid in exploring architectural alternatives; and to facilitate architectural analysis.