Extending the SEMAT Kernel to Represent and Assess Software Architecture Evaluations

Software architecture evaluation (SAE) is a key area in software architecture design. Some of its key challenges are describing and assessing the architecture itself, the architectural decisions, the business or mission goals, and the quality attributes; and further, the adoption itself of SAE practices. The lack of a standard representation for SAE endeavors hampers its adoption by development teams, its (semi-)automated support by tool providers, and its normative assessment by process specialists. In this paper we introduce SAEMET (Software Architecture Evaluation MEthod and Theory), an extension of the Essence standard proposed by SEMAT and adopted by OMG; The Essence kernel defines 'things' (called Alphas) any software engineering endeavor should include, and provides an extensible representation to be used for assessing an endeavor progression. SAEMET includes five sub-alphas (Quality Attributes, Business Goals, Architecture Description, Architecture Decision, and Evaluation Adoption), and provides a complete description for each one, their progression levels, and the relationships among them. Our approach is useful for representing an already published architecture review, conducted using DCAR (Decision-Centric Architecture Review method), and assessing its suitability for actionable support of adoption, automated support, and normative assessment. Ongoing empirical evaluation of SAEMET is underway, and early results indicate it is usable and useful for guiding and auditing SAE endeavor, as well as planning courses to train teams for adopting SAE.