Positive Side-Effects of Evaluating a Software Architecture

Software architecture evaluation is a key quality practice in the design of a software architecture, making such efforts critical for software quality. Such efforts are commonly reported in research venues as experience reports. While these reports typically also report other than expected effects from evaluating a software architecture, authors commonly report them as anecdotes. In this paper we present a series of other than expected effects from evaluating software architectures which we call positive side effects, that is, unintended effects or by-products that have a beneficial consequence as reported by stakeholders involved. We have observed these side effects in several architecture evaluations we have led and we present them in this article describing the effect and the circumstances where we observed the effect. We believe these positive side effects will encourage practitioners to adopt the software architecture evaluation practice and researchers to widen their view about what are the possible research issues to explore.