ASAAM: aspectual software architecture analysis method

Software architecture analysis methods aim to predict the quality of a system before it has been developed. In general, the quality of the architecture is validated by analyzing the impact of predefined scenarios on architectural components. Hereby, it is implicitly assumed that an appropriate refactoring of the architecture design can help in coping with critical scenarios and mending the architecture. This paper shows that there are also concerns at the architecture design level which inherently crosscut multiple architectural components, which cannot be localized in one architectural component and which, as such, can not be easily managed by using conventional abstraction mechanisms. We propose the aspectual software architecture analysis method (ASAAM) to explicitly identify and specify these architectural aspects and make them transparent early in the software development life cycle. ASAAM introduces a set of heuristic rules that help to derive architectural aspects and the corresponding tangled architectural components from scenarios. The approach is illustrated for architectural aspect identification in the architecture design of a window management system.