The Five Factors Influencing Software Architecture Modeling and Evaluation Techniques

Two of the most important aspects that help architects to describe, automate, and evaluate architecture artefacts with precision include the use of Software Architecture (SA) modeling languages, and the selection of SA evaluation methods. Accurate, verifiable architecture descriptions are more likely to result in successful software development outcomes. There appears to be an unnatural and significant disconnect between SA artefacts and both pre and post- architecture development artefacts. The disconnect seems to exist for various, sometimes unrelated, reasons not all of which have yet been fully investigated. In an effort to confirm (some of) the factors that influence effective utilisation of software/system architecture artefacts in the process of software/system development, the author(s) of this paper try to address the aforementioned problem by focusing on the investigation of five factors that influence SA evaluation and its automation process. These factors include: Formality of SA descriptions; modelling of SA; SA documentation; standardisation of SA; and current SA evaluation tools. Contributing to the identification of these five influential factors, and their discussion, is a section of a questionnaire which was broadly aimed at discussing matters relating to software/system architecture descriptions and evaluation in industry.