Developing Software Architecture Comparison Analysis Method for Critical Socio-Technical Systems

Software Architecture Comparison Analysis Methods provide organizations with a rationale for an architecture selection process by comparing the fitness of software architecture candidates for required systems. Comparing software architectures for any nontrivial system is a difficult task. Software architectures are designed with particular requirements and constraints, and are often poorly documented. With the lack of data about software architecture, developing comparison methods based on a black box approach is considered very helpful, and architectures can be compared based on a set of criteria derived from the business goals of an organization. A popular method for comparing software architectures as black box is the Software Architecture Comparison Analysis Method (SACAM) developed by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI). SACAM compares the architectures of software systems and not the implementation code. SACAM does not address enterprise architecture issues such as implemented software evolution and maintenance. This paper discusses and presents a proposed adaptation of SACAM to be applied in the context of critical socio-technical systems where issues of architecture evolution and maintenance are considered important factors in selecting a strategy to software modernization. The proposed method is called software Architecture Comparison Analysis Method for Critical Systems (SACAM-CS). SACAM-CS is an architecture selection method based on multi-criteria decision analysis. The proposed method has been validated using a suitable case study to compare among two check-in systems used in international airports.