Towards an ontology approach to ATAM based assessment of service oriented architectures

Grzegorz Rogus, Paweł Skrzyński, Michał Turek, Jan Werewka, Piotr Szwed
2012 Automatyka/Automatics  
In this paper we describe SOAROAD (SOA Related Ontology of Architectural Decisions), which was developed to support evaluation of architectures of information systems using SOA technologies. The main goal of the ontology is to provide constructs for documenting service-oriented architectures, however, it is designed to support future reasoning. Building the ontology we focused on the requirements of Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method (ATAM). ATAM is a scenario-based method for architecture
more » ... sessment defining a quality model and an organizational framework for evaluation process. ATAM represents expected system qualities as a mapping between scenarios and quality attributes. System architecture being the input for ATAM is expressed in form of views describing components and their connections. During the evaluation a team of experts analyzes selected properties of components and connections to detect sensitivity points, tradeoffs and assigns risks. A limitation of the method is that it depends on expert's knowledge, perception and previous experience. It may easily happen, that an inexperienced evaluator overlooks some implicit decisions and risks introduced by them. We propose SOAROAD ontology as a tool supporting ATAM based assessment of systems following service-orientation paradigm and deploying web services. The ontology gathering knowledge about various properties and decisions related to SOA may facilitate performing an assessment in more exhaustive manner, helping to ask questions, revealing implicit design decisions and obtaining more reliable results.
doi:10.7494/automat.2012.16.2.175 fatcat:ojlbo47embdgnaqsamvixzkhs4