OVERVIEW

In the previous chapter, we studied the concept of scenarios and the basics of specifying quality requirements in scenarios. We have seen how to analyse a software architectural design against one scenario. However, questions remain, such as how to systematically elicit quality requirements and represent such requirements in a set of scenarios, and how to evaluate and analyse architectural design against a set of scenarios, which may have interactions between them. This chapter addresses these questions by presenting the SAAM method for evaluating and analysing modifiability based on information presented in architectural designs. SAAM is the acronym of Software Architecture Analysis Method. It was proposed by a group of computer scientists at the Software Engineering Institute of Carnegie Mellon University largely due to the work by Len Bass and Gregory Abowd [1, 2]. It is believed to be the first documented and widely known software architecture analysis method. It is a scenario-based analysis method. The objectives of the chapter are:

• To further study how to elicit modifiability requirements and to represent them in a set of scenarios;

• To study how to analyse and evaluate architectural designs against a set of scenarios that represent modifiability requirements;

• To learn how to apply the SAAM method.

The chapter is organised as follows. Section 1 discusses the input and output of SAAM analysis. Section 2 is an introduction to the process of SAAM analysis. We will illustrate the method by an example. Section 3 uses the case study of a...