Analysis of architecture evaluation data

The output of 18 software architecture evaluations is analyzed. The goal of the analysis is to find patterns in the important quality attributes and risk themes identified in the evaluations. The major results are•A categorization of risk themes.•The observation that twice as many risk themes are risks of “omission” as are risks of “commission”.•A failure to find a relationship between the business and mission goals of a system and the risk themes from an evaluation of that system.•A failure to find a correlation between the domain of a system being evaluated and the important quality attributes for that system.•A wide diversity of names used for various quality attributes.The results of this investigation have application to practitioners by suggesting activities on which developers should put greater focus. They also have application to researchers by suggesting further areas of investigation.