An Empirical Study of the Effectiveness of Software Architecture Evaluation Meetings

Abstract

One of the most important issues in scenario-based software architecture evaluation is the development of scenarios for characterizing a desired set of quality attributes by holding meetings of stakeholders. As such meetings are costly to arrange, studying the effectiveness of such meetings is an important research question. In this paper, we report on the findings from a software architecture evaluation empirical study aimed at investigating the effectiveness of scenario development meetings in terms of the quantity of gained and lost scenarios during the evaluation process. The findings from the experiment data analysis raise the question about the effectiveness of holding meetings for developing scenarios as more existing scenarios were lost than new scenarios were gained as a result of these meetings.

Keywords

• Architecture evaluation
• process improvement
• controlled experiment
• scenario development
• empirical study