Evaluation of the Software Architecture Styles from Maintainability Viewpoint

In the process of software architecture design, different decisions are made that have systemwide impact. An important decision of design stage is the selection of a suitable software architecture style. Lack of investigation on the quantitative impact of architecture styles on software quality attributes is the main problem in using such styles. So, the use of architecture styles in designing is based on the intuition of software developers. The aim of this research is to quantify the impacts of architecture styles on software maintainability. In this study, architecture styles are evaluated based on coupling, complexity and cohesion metrics and ranked by analytic hierarchy process from maintainability viewpoint. The main contribution of this paper is quantification and ranking of software architecture styles from the perspective of maintainability quality attribute at stage of architectural style selection.