The essential components of software architecture design and analysis

Summary form only given. Architecture analysis and design methods such as ATAM, QAW, ADD and CBAM have enjoyed modest success in recent years and are being adopted by many companies as part of their standard software development processes. They are used in the software lifecycle, as a means of understanding business goals and stakeholder concerns, mapping these onto an architectural representation, and assessing the risks associated with this mapping. These methods have evolved a set of shared component techniques. In this article the author describes how these techniques can be combined in countless ways to create needs-specific methods. The author demonstrates the generality of these techniques by describing a new architecture improvement method called APTIA (analytic principles and tools for the improvement of architectures). APTIA almost entirely reuses pre-existing techniques but in a new combination, with new goals and results. Lastly, the author exemplifies APTIA's use in improving the architecture of a commercial information system.