Assessing and maintaining architectural quality

Software architecture analysis is a cost effective means of controlling risk and maintaining system quality throughout the processes of software design, development and maintenance. The paper presents a sequence of steps that maps architectural quality goals into scenarios that measure the goals, mechanisms that realize the scenarios and analytic models that measure the results. This mapping ensures that design decisions and their rationale are documented in such a fashion that they can be systematically explored, varied, and potentially traded off against each other. As systems evolve, the analytic models can be used to assess the impact of architectural changes, relative to the system´s changing quality goals