SAABNet: Managing Qualitative Knowledge in Software Architecture Assessment

Quantitative techniques have traditionally been used to assess software architectures. We have found that early in the development process there is often insufficient quantitative information to perform such assessments. So far the only way to make qualitative assessments about an architecture, is to use qualitative assessment techniques such as peer reviews. The problem with this type of assessment techniques is that they depend on the knowledge of the expert designers who use them. In this paper we introduce a technique, SAABNet (Software Architecture Assessment Belief Network), that provides support to make qualitative assessments of software architectures.