Distilling scenarios from patterns for software architecture evaluation

Software architecture (SA) evaluation is a quality assurance technique that is increasingly attracting significant research and commercial interests. A number of SA evaluation methods have been developed. Most of these methods are scenario-based, which relies on the quality of the scenarios used for the evaluation. Most of the existing techniques for developing scenarios use stakeholders and requirements documents as main sources of collecting scenarios. Recently, architectures of large software systems are usually composed of patterns and styles. One of the purposes of using patterns is to develop systems with predictable quality attributes. Since patterns are documented in a format that requires the inclusion of problem, solution and quality consequences, we observed that scenarios are, though as informal text, pervasive in patterns description, which can be extracted and documented for the SA evaluation. Thus, we claim that the patterns can be another source of collecting quality attributes sensitive scenarios. This position paper presents arguments and examples to support our claim.