Analytic architecture assessment in SOA solution design and its engineering application

Abstract

In this paper, we present an architecture-centric assessment approach for model evaluation over reference architecture to quantitatively estimate architecture maturity and quality. Such assessment is essential to support design-level refinement for an enterprise solution. To achieve this analytic goal, we select a nine-layer SOA solution stack (S3) as reference architecture, and introduce the necessary mathematical definitions and formulation. The baseline for such assessment is a model template composed of S3 solution patterns. A template is the starting point of creating a design model. The selection of such template will largely determine the architecture properties of the final SOA solution. The maturity analysis is carried out at different granularity levels (architecture building block, architecture layer, and architecture model) to justify the 'completeness' of a design. The quality assessment is accomplished through a set of quality-indicators to justify the 'goodness' of an architecture based on the relationships of architecture building block instances. Finally, using UML 2.0 to capture the model of S3, we provide a real assessment prototype developed over IBM RSA platform. © 2009 IEEE.