Department of Computer Engineering, College of EME, National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), H-12, Islamabad, Pakistan.

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Abstract—Software engineering society has suggested many methods of software architecture to enhance the preferred quality with concern of performance, reliability, maintainability, usability etc. However little effort is required for systematic comparison of these methods to mind variances and resemblances between existing methods. By using an evaluation framework, we will compare four famous software architecture evaluation approaches. This framework considers each software architecture evaluation approach from the context structure, method context, performance and different stakeholders. The systematic comparisons shows the limitation and narrowness of existing methods that are anatomically similar but there is a huge difference with respect to activities and methods, however, some methods overlap which help us to identify five common activities that can be used to develop a generic process model. With the help of this comparative study we can understand contribution in SA evaluation and their limitation; finally we proposed five activities and their flow work in this comparative study.

Index Terms—SAAM (scenario based architecture analysis) ALMA (architecture level modifiability analysis), ATAM (trade-off analysis method) NIMBSAD (normative information model based system analysis and design).

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Cite: Ali Athar, Rao Muzamal Liaqat, Farooque Azam, "A Comparative Analysis of Software Architecture Evaluation Methods," Journal of Software vol. 11, no. 9, pp. 934-942, 2016.