An Approach to Evaluate the Adaptability of Software Architectures

Software architectures for adaptive software systems should be flexible enough to allow components to change their behaviour depending on the environmental changes and goals of the system. Evaluating the adaptability at the software architecture level to identify the weakness of the architecture and further to improve the architecture based on the adaptability are most important issues for software professionals today. The contribution of this paper is an Adaptability Evaluation Method (AEM) that, before system implementation, defines how the adaptability requirements can be negotiated and mapped to the architecture, how they can be represented in architectural models, and how the architecture can be evaluated and analysed in order to validate whether or not the requirements are met. The AEM fills the gap from requirements engineering to evaluation and provides an approach for the adaptability evaluation at the software architecture level. The AEM has been validated with a real-world wireless environment controlling system.