Inside Architecture Evaluation: Analysis and Representation of Optimization Potential

The share of software in embedded systems has been growing permanently in the recent years. Thus, software architecture as well as its evaluation has become an important part of embedded systems design to define, assess, and assure architecture and system quality. Furthermore, design space exploration can be based on architecture evaluation. To achieve an efficient exploration process, architectural decisions need to be well considered. In this paper, analysis of architecture evaluation is performed to uncover dependencies of the quality attributes which are the first class citizens of architecture evaluation. With an explicit representation of such dependencies, valuable changes of an architecture can be calculated. Next to the exploration support, the analysis results help to document architecture knowledge and make architectural decisions explicit and traceable. The development process can now be based on dependable and well documented architectural decisions. Effects of changes become more predictable. Time and costs can be saved by avoiding suboptimal changes.