Simulation-based architectural evaluation for collaborative systems

Abstract

Software quality can be expressed through various attributes, many of which depend on the architecture by nature. Therefore an architecture-focused development process, with an integrated self-evaluation, must be selected. Since there is no known process covering these attributes, a method capable of evaluating the architecture must be built into the development process. The purpose of this research is presenting the incorporation of Bosch's (2000) architectural design method, formulated to a standard software development process, emphasizing on the definition of the software architecture through its quality attributes. The improved development process was applied to the knowledge management system (KMS) case study, in the domain of collaborative systems. The most important quality attributes for the KMS were selected, candidate architectures were proposed for it and the most suitable architecture selected using a simulation technique. A result of this research was the specification of the critical quality attributes for the collaborative systems domain.