Simulation-Based Architectural Evaluation for Collaborative Systems

Software quality can be expressed through various attributes, many of which depend on the architecture by nature. The foundation of any software systems is the architecture. This means evaluating software architecture early in the development process, to mitigate risks and emphasizing on the architecture definition and specification. Therefore an architecture-focused development process, with an integrated selfevaluation, must be selected. Since there is no known process covering these attributes, a method capable of evaluating the architecture must be built into the development process. The purpose of this research is to present the incorporation of Design & Use of Software Architecture method, formulated by Jan Bosch to a standard software development process, emphasizing on the definition of the software architecture through its quality attributes. The improved development process was applied to the Knowledge Management System (KMS) case study, in the domain of Collaborative Systems. The most important quality attributes for the KMS were selected during the elaboration phase, candidates architectures were proposed for it and the most suitable architecture selected using a simulation technique based on the RAPIDE Architecture Definition Language. An interesting result of this research was the specification of the critical quality attributes for the Collaborative Systems domain.