ATAM-HW: Extending ATAM for Explicitly Incorporating Hardware-Related Trade-Off Decisions

ATAM is a widely known software architecture analysis method based on trade-offs of design decisions for coping with quality attribute requirements. Practically, all reported cases of applying ATAM refer mainly to software-intensive systems. However, there is a series of software systems for which fulfilling their requirements strongly depends on hardware-related decisions. As ATAM provides no special treatment for these cases, several problems arise when applying the method. In this paper we present ATAM_HW, an extension to ATAM, that explicitly deals with hardware-related decisions. It adds some steps to ATAM to links quality attributes requirements of a system with hardware related decisions made by the architect. We illustrate its application for analyzing a virtual electrical generator that has been developed in the last years.