This presentation was created for the SATURN conference series and does not necessarily reflect the positions and views of the Software Engineering Institute.

keynote presentation from the SEI Software Architecture Technology User Network (SATURN) Workshop, April 6-7, 2005, Pittsburgh, PA

Finding Risks can be fun?

Automotive Software Architectures 

As software is covering more and more functionality in cars, software architectures draw more attention. Software architectures represent the earliest design decisions in the development process. They have far-reaching effects on the quality attributes of the system and, thus, are extremely difficult to get right first and hard to change later on. The Architecture Trade-off Analysis Method (ATAM) developed by the SEI assesses the quality of software architecture early in the development process. ATAM is a scenario-based review method that uses business goals to evaluate the quality of software architectures.

Bosch Experience 

Bosch uses ATAM for five years in reviewing important software and system architectures. The improvement of the method and the knowledge transition from the SEI to Bosch will be discussed in detail.

Benefits of ATAM 

Benefits in using ATAM are not only the review results itself but a better documented and better understood architecture. We experienced that the most important benefit of ATAM is the rising stakeholders' awareness of architectural decisions, tradeoffs, and risks. It illuminates the software architecture better than any written documentation.

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