Quality Metrics in Software Architecture

The importance of software architecture is largely recognized also in iterative and agile development settings. However, it is quite complex to provide evidence that an architecture is of good quality and that the architectural decisions are appropriate, correct, or optimal. Architecture evaluation aims at showing and providing confidence that design decisions contribute to fulfilling the stakeholder concerns. Some architecture evaluation methods are scenario-based and aim at balancing many potentially conflicting quality attributes. Other works focus on a specific quality attribute and provide metrics to measure it. In this paper we survey the state of the art in metrics for evaluating quality attributes of architectures. The elicited metrics are organized into a catalog, which associates them with the specific quality attributes they aim to measure. We contribute also an MDE framework that generates web views facilitating the analysis of architectures. In this way, researchers and practitioners can easily retrieve the metrics that are appropriate to their specific needs. The catalog of metrics and quality attributes is released to the research community and open to contributions from experts and practitioners.