Early assessment of software architecture qualities

This paper presents an approach for the ad-hoc assessment of software architecture qualities. The method allows evaluating architectures at early development stages and focuses on development qualities (e.g., coupling), rather than on runtime qualities (e.g., performance). Early feedback in the development process facilitates immediate improvement of low quality architecture artifacts. The proposed method defines three levels of architecture quality attributes, some of which are expressed as computable metrics while the other quality attributes are derived from these metrics. Throughout the paper, the example of a cruise-control system illustrates the approach.