The Platform Based-Agents to Test and Evaluate Software Architecture

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 non functional requirements. This paper discusses of an easier approach to evaluate the software architecture. To achieve this goal, we orient our research to the development of intelligent and autonomous platform based-agents in order to evaluate and test the software architecture. The platform is oriented to intelligent system basedagents, which is an emerging technology that is making computer systems easier to use by allowing people to delegate work back to the computer. However, we exploit the advantage of the multi-agents systems like the flexibility, the performance, the parallelism and the high level of abstraction for the construction of our platform. We propose in our paper, a multi-agents platform which can be used, in static mode, as a tool to guide and help architect to make the right architectural choice during the design phase process. In this phase; the architects are interested in the outcome of the evaluation and have the power to make decisions that affect the future of the project. This platform can also be used, in dynamic mode, as tool to show to the architects different scenarios about the evolution and the behavior of one or several quality attributes. Each quality attribute is given an estimated value, using qualitative or quantitative assessment technique. Then, the platform offers the advantage to observe the relationships and the influence between several quality attributes required for an application. The platform offers the possibility to reconfigure dynamically the architecture in order to maintain one or several quality attributes. These qualities are represented by some scenarios grouped in some profiles that capture typical changes in quality requirements.