Scenario-Based Generation and Evaluation of Software Architectures

Architecture conception is a difficult and time consuming process, requiring advanced skills from the software architect. The tasks of an architect are alleviated if means can be provided to generate architectures that can be evaluated with respect to functional and nonfunctional requirements. This paper discusses an approach for doing so. It centers around a rich feature-solution graph which captures the evolving knowledge about requirements and solution fragments. This graph is used to guide an iterative architecture development process.