Towards an Architecture Quality Index for the Behavior of Software Systems

Software architecture lies at the backbone of any software system and its choice directly influences important non-functional characteristics such as maintainability, extensibility, etc. Up-to-date software architecture descriptions should be at any time available to support the analysis and evaluation of the current state of the architecture. However the current state of the art lacks both methodologies and tools for ensuring availability of architecture descriptions and fails to offer objective means for evaluating software architectures. Currently, no generally accepted method for comparing software from an architecture point of view exists. In this paper, we present our current results towards creating a so-called architecture quality index that includes a bidirectional architecture quality model as well as a quality benchmark created for the context of the ARAMIS research project. The proposed architecture quality index aims to support the architects to evaluate and compare the architecture of software systems based on information extracted during the considered systems´ run-time.