Biography Chris Armstrong, President of Armstrong Process Group, Inc., is an internationally recognized thought leader and expert in iterative software development, object-oriented analysis and design, architecture, the Unified Modeling Language, use case driven requirements, and process improvement. Chris is the technical representative for APG at the Object Management Group.

Presentation
Assessing Architectural Viability with the Architecture Trade-off Analysis Method
Software development teams often struggle explaining the value of software architecture to their business stakeholders. Invariably this leads to an excruciating technical description of the architecture that only confirms to the business people that they should not care about the architecture. However, in reality, the only reason for investing in architecture is based on delivering continual business value to the organization. Many teams would be better served by applying an objective technique for assessing how well a particular architecture serves real business needs. The speaker will describe the Software Engineering Institute’s (SEI) Architecture Trade-off Analysis Method (ATAM) to objectively measure fitness of an architecture and how use cases and non-functional requirements are the key to objective evaluation. The speaker will also discuss real-world application of the ATAM through examination of a case study and discuss the ATAM's relationship to the OMG's Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) initiative.