Applicability of General Scenarios to the Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method

The SEI has been developing a list of scenarios to characterize quality attributes. The SEI has also been conducting Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method (ATAM) evaluations. One output of an ATAM evaluation is a collection of scenarios that relate to quality attribute requirements for the specific system being evaluated. In this report, we compare the scenarios elicited from five ATAM evaluations with the scenarios used to characterize the quality attributes. This effort was designed to validate the coverage of the existing set of general scenarios and to analyze trends in the risks uncovered in ATAM reports.