Continuous Evaluation of Software Architectures: An Overview of the State of the Art

Continuous Software Engineering (CSE) has been increasingly adopted as a way to develop and evolve software-intensive systems. It aims to handle constant market changes, rapid adoption of new technologies, and continuous value delivery for end users. At the same time, most software-intensive systems should present high-quality software architectures, which could be achieved by applying methods for architecture evaluation. However, it is not clear how these architectures have been evaluated in the context of CSE. Hence, this paper presents an overview of the state of the art of how software architectures have been evaluated and the associated evaluation methods. For this, we systematically examined the literature and gathered information that supported us to draw this overview. As main results, different approaches to continuously evaluate software architectures have been tried, while such approaches have also drawn attention from industry. But there are still open issues to be investigated towards the consolidation of software architecture continuous evaluation methods.