Ontology of architectural decisions supporting ATAM based assessment of SOA architectures

Nowadays, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) might be treated as a state of the art approach to the design and implementation of enterprise software. Contemporary software developed according to SOA paradigm is a complex structure, often integrating various platforms, technologies, products and design patterns. Hence, it arises a problem of early evaluation of a software architecture to detect design flaws that might compromise expected system qualities. Such assessment requires extensive knowledge gathering information on various types of architectural decisions, their relations and influences on quality attributes. In this paper we describe SOAROAD (SOA Related Ontology of Architectural Decisions), which was developed to support the evaluation of architectures of information systems using SOA technologies. The main goal of the ontology is to provide constructs for documenting SOA. However, it is designed to support future reasoning about architecture quality and for building a common knowledge base. When building the ontology we focused on the requirements of Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method (ATAM) which was chosen as a reference methodology of architecture evaluation.