Evaluating Software Architectures: Methods and Case Studies

The foundation of any software system is its architecture. Using this book, you can evaluate every aspect of architecture in advance, at remarkably low cost -- identifying improvements that can dramatically improve any system's performance, security, reliability, and maintainability. As the practice of software architecture has matured, it has become possible to identify causal connections between architectural design decisions and the qualities and properties that result downstream in the systems that follow from them. This book shows how, offering step-by-step guidance, as well as detailed practical examples -- complete with sample artifacts reflective of those that evaluators will encounter. The techniques presented here are applicable not only to software architectures, but also to system architectures encompassing computing hardware, networking equipment, and other elements. For all software architects, software engineers, developers, IT managers, and others responsible for creating, evaluating, or implementing software architectures.

Paul Clements is a senior member of the technical staff at the SEI, where he works on software architecture and product line engineering. He is the author of five books and more than three dozen papers on these and other topics.

Rick Kazman is a senior member of the technical staff at the SEI. He is also an Associate Professor at the University of Hawaii. He is the author of two books, editor of two more, and has written more than seventy papers on software engineering and related topics.

Mark Klein is a senior member of the technical staff at the SEI. He is an adjunct professor in the Masters of Software Engineering program at Carnegie Mellon and a coauthor of A Practitioner's Handbook for Real-time Analysis: Guide to Rate Monotonic Analysis for Real-Time Systems (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993).