What Is Architecture Evaluation?

In this chapter, we will present what architecture evaluation is and what it consists of. We will break down the overall method of architecture evaluation into five clearly delineated checks: (1) checking the integrity of the drivers, (2) checking the solution adequacy of an architecture, (3) checking the architecture documentation quality, (4) checking the compliance of the implementation with the architecture, and (5) checking the code quality in general. We will introduce confidence levels as a response to the risk-driven idea of architecture evaluation: we only want to invest as much as needed to gain enough confidence. We will show how evaluation results can be interpreted, aggregated, and represented to senior management by mapping them to a color-coded rating scale.