Part I is a presentation of requirements engineering theory. Part II forms the basis for deciding what core functionality is. This part contains a look at the requirements engineering process at two specific companies as well as a survey of commercially available requirements engineering tools. A prototype of this tool was implemented to evaluate and better understand the requirements. Last updated 07 May 1999.
Architectural decisions have great impact on the quality of a software system.
As a result it is important to evaluate how a software architecture meets its quality demands. The Software Architecture Analysis method, SAAM, and the Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method, ATAM, are two ways of evaluating a software architecture's fitness with respect to multiple competing quality attributes. The objective of this master thesis is to evaluate the SAAM and the ATAM evaluation methods in the context of assessing the quality of a software architecture. In order to do this, a description of these methods has been constructed, as well as an architecture assessment process. SAAM has empirically been found to be a simple evaluation method, but it has a few confusing areas that could be improved.