The ATAM process is a short, facilitated interaction between the stakeholders to conduct the activities outlined in the blackboard, leading to the identification of risks, sensitivities, and tradeoffs:
• risks can be the focus of mitigation activities, e.g. further design, further analysis, prototyping
• sensitivities and tradeoffs can be explicitly documented
Architecture reviews are not repeatable without a process. ATAM gives a defined process to achieve a repeatable architecture evaluation process.
The federally funded Software Engineering Institute Carnegie Mellon has pioneered this method for evaluation of software architectures.
