Six years of evaluating software architectures in student projects

Abstract

Software architecture evaluations are an important decision support tool when developing software systems. It is thus important that they are conducted professionally and that the results are of high quality. In order to improve the quality, it is necessary for the participants to gain experience in conducting software architecture evaluations. In this article we present guidelines based on six years of experience in software architecture evaluations. Although we primarily focus on our experiences on software architecture evaluation in student projects, we have also applied the same method in industry with similar experiences. © 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.