Risk Themes Discovered Through Architecture Evaluations

Parent SEI Project

Software Architecture Technology Initiative

Related Publications

Models for Evaluating and Improving Architecture Competence

Len Bass
Robert Nord
William Wood
David Zubrow

Technical Report
CMU/SEI-2006-TR-012

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This technical report analyzes the output of 18 evaluations conducted using the Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method (ATAM) developed by the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute. The goal of this analysis was to find patterns in the risk themes identified during those evaluations. The major results are

• a categorization of risk themes
• the observation that twice as many risk themes are risks of "omission" as are risks of "commission"
• a failure to find a relationship between the business/mission goals of a system and the risk themes revealed during an ATAM evaluation of that system
• a failure to find a relationship between the domain of a system being evaluated and the risk themes associated with the development of that system