Current SEI SAT Initiative Technology Investigations

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

One of the axioms of the SEI’s Software Architecture Technology (SAT) Initiative is that quality attribute requirements such as those for security, performance, modifiability, usability, and so forth have a dominant influence on a software architecture. Many people are familiar with our methods such as the SEI Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method (ATAM) and SEI Quality Attribute Workshop (QAW) and would like to know more about some of the current research of the SAT Initiative. In this talk, we will discuss two current research projects. First, we will provide a brief overview of our investigation into service-oriented architectures. Secondly, we will focus on SEI ArchE, which is an expert system that makes the design process more transparent and helps software architects to make appropriate decisions. Currently, ArchE can reason about modifiability and real-time performance. We have recently completed an interface that will allow collaborators to add additional quality attribute knowledge to enhance the capability of ArchE.