Experiences in System Architecture Evaluation: A Communication View for Architectural Design

Successful system architecture design requires an understanding of the needs and requirements of a wide range of stakeholders covering the complete system architecture-related life cycle. Communicating with various stakeholders is a highly delicate task and may cause misunderstandings during the translation of functional needs into architectural properties. We developed the Architecture Evaluation Framework (AEF) to improve the design of telecommunication network elements architecture. The various uses of AEF include checking the appropriateness of architecture in relation to business drivers, suitability of external components (COTS, open source), evaluating internal coherence of a product family, or prioritizing development efforts. Furthermore, the AEF is scalable in terms of process phases and framework comprehensiveness. In this paper, we discuss the creation and use of the AEF. The important architectural issues gathered from product life cycle stakeholders form a framework, a hierarchy of architectural factors. We use a bottom-up approach in building the hierarchy. Thus, the selected factors reflect the terminology used among the stakeholders. Based on our experiences, we claim that such a framework is easy to learn and helps to communicate architectural preferences. These benefits are achieved by using the internal origin, familiar factors, and embedded support for all definitions used in the factor hierarchy.