Publications on Architecture Evaluation

Gregory D. Abowd

This page summarizes the publications on the topic of architectural evaluation. The majority of this work concerns the development and application of the Software Architecture Analysis Method (SAAM). This work has been conducted in collaboration with Rick Kazman, Len Bass and Paul Clements at the Software Engineering Institute.

More recent work in this area has come about through the DARPA MORALE project and involves extending SAAM to capture live architectural rationale as well as a process called architectural synthesis

ICSE-16
Kazman, R., Bass, L., Abowd, G. and Webb, S.M. SAAM: A method for analyzing the properties of software architecture. Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Engineering - ICSE'16, pages 81-90, 1994.

This is the first paper written describing the SAAM method. Though the SAAM method has changed a bit since this original paper, this is a good place to read about the motivations for developing SAAM. We examine one case study of user interface development environments in this paper.

5ICSQ conference
Paul Clements, Len Bass, Rick Kazman and Gregory Abowd. Predicting Software Quality by Architecture-Level Evaluation, In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Software Quality, Austin, Texas, October 1995.

This paper applies SAAM to the classic Key Word in Context (KWIC) problem first discussed by Parnas.

Scenario-based evaluation
Rick Kazman, Gregory Abowd, Len Bass and Paul Clements. Scenario-based analysis of software architecture. College of Computing, Georgia Tech, Technical Report GIT-CC-94-41, October 1995. Early draft of paper to appear in IEEE Software in 1996.

This is a synthesis of the SAAM evaluation technique, including three case studies that apply SAAM in varying degrees.

Internet case study
Gregory Abowd, Jim Pitkow and Rick Kazman. Analyzing differences between Internet information system software architectures. GVU Center, Georgia Tech, Technical Report GIT-GVU-95-34, October 1995.

A case study comparing three Internet information systems at the architectural level using SAAM.

Object Request Broker case study
Gregory Abowd, Jonathan Engelsma, Luigi Guadagno and Okonon Okon. Architectural Analysis of Object Request Brokers. To appear in Object Magazine special issue on distributed systems, 1996.

This paper is a SAAM evaluation of two commercial Object Request brokers that was performed with colleagues in Motorola's Cellular Infrastructure Group.

A case study on graphical debuggers
D. Scott McCrickard and Gregory D. Abowd. Assessing the impact of changes at the architectural level: A case study on graphical debuggers. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM'96), February 1996.

This paper is a SAAM evaluation of two publically available graphical debuggers and demonstrates the usefulness of visualization techniques and reflexion models to determine the validity of an architectural representation .

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