The essential components of software architecture design and analysis

Architecture analysis and design methods such as ATAM, QAW, ADD and CBAM have enjoyed modest success and are being adopted by many companies as part of their standard software development processes. They are used in the lifecycle, as a means of understanding business goals and stakeholders concerns, mapping these onto an architectural representation, and assessing the risks associated with this mapping. These methods have evolved a set of shared component techniques. In this paper we show how these techniques can be combined in countless ways to create needs-specific methods in an agile way. We demonstrate the generality of these techniques by describing a new architecture improvement method called APTIA (Analytic Principles and Tools for the Improvement of Architectures). APTIA almost entirely reuses pre-existing techniques but in a new combination, with new goals and results. We exemplify APTIA’s use in improving the architecture of a commercial information system.