Architecture Evaluation Report (ATAM): [System name]

Report of a scenario-based architecture evaluation following the Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method (ATAM) developed at the Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University. It records the business drivers, the architecture as presented, the quality attribute utility tree, prioritised scenarios, the analysis of architectural approaches, and the resulting sensitivity points, trade-off points, risks, non-risks and risk themes. Replace every [bracketed] value and every row marked Example.

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Approvals

Revision history

Contents

1. Executive summary
2. Evaluation context and participants
3. Business drivers
4. Architecture presentation
5. Architectural approaches
6. Quality attribute utility tree
7. Scenario brainstorm and prioritisation
8. Analysis of architectural approaches
9. Findings: sensitivity points, trade-offs, risks, non-risks
10. Risk themes and business impact
11. Conclusions and next steps
12. Appendices

1. Executive summary

[Example: "On YYYY-MM-DD and YYYY-MM-DD, eleven stakeholders and a four-person evaluation team evaluated the architecture of the Payments Hub against 34 scenarios. The architecture handles throughput and modifiability scenarios well. Three risk themes threaten the business drivers: (1) single-region dependencies undermine the 99.99% availability goal, (2) the absence of end-to-end idempotency risks duplicate payments during failover, and (3) observability is insufficient to meet the 15-minute incident detection target. Twelve risks are recorded; seven actions are recommended in section 11."]

2. Evaluation context and participants

2.1 Purpose and scope

2.2 Phases held

2.3 Participants

3. Business drivers

3.1 Business goals and context

[Summary of the presentation by the project manager or sponsor: market, customers, business goals, timeline, and why the system matters.]

3.2 Constraints

4. Architecture presentation

The architect presented the following views; the context is summarised below.

5. Architectural approaches

6. Quality attribute utility tree

The utility tree below summarises the attributes and refinements; the table lists the scenarios with their ratings.

7. Scenario brainstorm and prioritisation

Each stakeholder received [n] votes, where $n = \lceil 0.3 \times N_{scenarios} \rceil$, to distribute across the brainstormed scenarios.

Observation: [Example: "Two of the three top-voted scenarios were not in the utility tree, both about payment integrity under failure, indicating that integrity concerns were underrepresented in the architecture presentation."]

8. Analysis of architectural approaches

8.1 Scenario U-02: region failure

8.2 Scenario S-01: duplicate payment after partition

8.3 Further scenarios

[Repeat the table for each scenario selected in sections 6 and 7. Record "not analysed" with a reason for any high-priority scenario that time did not allow.]

9. Findings: sensitivity points, trade-offs, risks, non-risks

9.1 Sensitivity points

9.2 Trade-off points

9.3 Risks

9.4 Non-risks

10. Risk themes and business impact

11. Conclusions and next steps

11.1 Conclusion

[Example: "The architecture is well suited to the performance and modifiability goals. It does not yet meet the availability and integrity goals under regional failure and retry conditions. With the actions below completed, the evaluation team considers the architecture fit for purpose."]

11.2 Action plan

11.3 Evaluation feedback

[Participants' feedback on the evaluation process, effort spent per group, and lessons for the next evaluation.]

12. Appendices

12.1 Full list of brainstormed scenarios

12.2 Glossary

12.3 Documents reviewed

Standard and licence note

Based on the Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method (ATAM) published by the Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University: phases, business drivers, utility tree, scenario prioritisation, analysis of architectural approaches, sensitivity and trade-off points, risks, non-risks and risk themes. This template is original text written for this collection and reproduces no text from SEI publications. ATAM is a method of Carnegie Mellon University. Template licence: MIT.