The architecture of a tool for scenario-based software architecture evaluation

Software architecture (SA) embodies earliest design choices that greatly affect system's quality. SA is evaluated to identify risks, problems and to see whether or not architecture will lead to the desired quality attributes. Many software architecture evaluation methods have been proposed in literature. SA evaluation, being human intensive process, involves many expensive and tiresome tasks. The overhead of these tasks can be reduced greatly by automating them. There is a lack of tool support for evaluation methods. Most of the methods are scenario based and besides having differences, they also have commonalities. Based upon the common activities of scenario based methods, generic requirements for a tool are listed in this paper. We will present the architecture of a reuse base tool for scenario based SA evaluation methods. The tool builds experience repositories for scenarios, architecture design and analysis artifacts and templates to provide a reusable knowledge base.