Classifying and Evaluating Architecture Design Methods

Abstract

The concept of software architecture has gained a wide popularity and is generally considered to play a fundamental role in coping with the inherent difficulties of the development of large-scale and complex software systems. This chapter provides a classification and evaluation of existing software architecture design methods. For this, contemporary definitions on software architectures are analyzed and a general definition of software architecture is introduced. Further, a meta-model for architecture design methods is presented, which is used as a basis for comparing various architecture design approaches. The problems of each architecture design method are described and the corresponding conclusions are given.KeywordsSoftware architectureclassification of architecture design methodsproblems in designing architectures