A Technical History of the SEI

cation description language, in the late 1980s. A focus on quality attributes in the context of business
goals has been the consistent theme of the SEI’s subsequent contributions to the field of software
architecture.
The ATAM, which is in use today, is a method for evaluating software architectures relative to
quality attribute goals. Since its development, the ATAM has emerged as the leading method in
the area of software architecture evaluation. ATAM evaluations expose architectural risks that potentially
inhibit the achievement of an organization’s business goals. The ATAM got its name because
it not only reveals how well an architecture satisfies particular quality goals, but it also provides
insight into how those quality goals interact and trade off with each other.
Emergence of Architecture as a Separate and Well-Defined Area
By 1996, software architecture was emerging as a separate and increasingly well-defined area of
interest within the field of software engineering. Two faculty members at Carnegie Mellon University
published the first academic book on software architecture [Shaw 1996]. The SEI followed
with a practitioner-oriented book [Bass 1997], and Siemens also published a book on software architecture
during this time [Hofmeister 1999]. As interest in software architecture grew, the SEI
started the Working IEEE/IFIP (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers/International
Federation for Information Processing) Conference on Software Architecture in San Antonio in
1999, providing a forum for the sharing of ideas and practices in the emerging field.
As the importance of software architecture became increasingly evident, the SEI began, in the late
1990s, to dedicate greater attention and resources to architecture-centric engineering. Results of
this strategic focus include the following:
Architecture reconstruction, 1997. This activity acknowledged the value of discovering implicit
architectures through an examination of available evidence, with support from the SEIdeveloped
Dali architecture-reconstruction tool and later the ARMIN (Architecture Reconstruction
and MINing) tool, 2003. The SEI first applied architecture reconstruction in an engagement
with the National Reconnaissance Office in 1998 [Kazman 1997, 2001].
Quality Attribute Workshop (QAW), 2001. The QAW identifies important quality attributes
and clarifies system requirements before there is a software architecture to evaluate. The
SEI first began developing the concept of a QAW in work with the Deepwater Project for the
Coast Guard in 1993. The QAW was derived from the ATAM. However, in its original incarnation,
the QAW was tightly entwined with government acquisition and acquisition cycles.
Understanding the utility of the technical core of the QAW, the SEI eventually developed a
context-free instrument and began to apply it. It was codified in 2003 [Barbacci 2003], and a
supporting toolkit was released in 2006.
Cost-Benefit Analysis Method (CBAM), 2001. Another offshoot of the ATAM, the CBAM
is an architecture-centric method for analyzing the costs, benefits, and schedule implications
of architectural decisions [Kazman 2002].
Views and Beyond approach for documenting a software architecture, 2001. In 2002, the
first edition of Documenting Software Architectures, an influential and frequently cited book
on the topic, was published in the SEI Series in Software Engineering by Addison-Wesley
[Clements 2002].
CMU/SEI-2016-SR-027 | SOFTWARE ENGINEERING INSTITUTE | CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY 235
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