Risk Themes Discovered through Architecture Evaluations

Abstract

The Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method (trademark) (ATAM (trademark)) is a method for evaluating software architectures relative to quality attribute goals. The ATAM, which was developed by the Carnegie Mellon (trademark) Software Engineering Institute (SEI), exposes architectural risks that potentially inhibit the achievement of an organization's business and mission goals. The SEI has been doing ATAM evaluations since 1998 and distilling the risks into risk themes since 2000. Risk themes are a summarization and consolidation of the collection of risks found during an evaluation. These themes cover continuously emerging risks that appear repeatedly in the total collection of risks, sensitivities, and tradeoffs, and they have a direct impact on the business drivers and the software architecture. Most evaluations produce an Architecture Evaluation Report as part of their output. SEI analyzed 18 final reports dated between 2000 and 2005, and this paper presents the results of that analysis. These ATAM evaluations produced 99 risk themes. Twelve of the systems are for the U.S. Department of Defense, two are for another government agency, and the other four are for commercial organizations, including Boeing. The domains involved range from information systems to embedded systems. The goal of the analysis was to find patterns in the risk themes identified during those evaluations. The major results are as follows: (1) a categorization of risk themes, (2) the observation that twice as many risk themes are risks of "omission" as are risks of "commission," (3) a failure to find a relationship between the business/mission goals of a system and the risk themes revealed during an ATAM evaluation of that system, and (4) a failure to find a relationship between the domain of a system being evaluated and the risk themes associated with the development of that system.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Sep 01, 2006
Accession Number
ADA456884

Entities

People

  • David Zubrow
  • Len Bass
  • Robert Nord
  • William Wood

Organizations

  • Carnegie Mellon University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • C4I

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Classification
  • Command And Control
  • Commerce
  • Complex Systems
  • Data Sets
  • Department Of Defense
  • Engineering
  • Failure Mode And Effect Analysis
  • Governments
  • Information Systems
  • Infrastructure
  • Observation
  • Software Design
  • Software Development
  • Standards
  • Test And Evaluation
  • United States

Fields of Study

  • Computer science
  • Engineering

Readers

  • Life Cycle Cost Analysis
  • Organizational Process Management (OPM).
  • Software Engineering.