Architectural Intelligence: A Framework and Application to E-Learning.

Architects need insights on the extent to which quality attributes are satisfied in order to adequately evolve software systems. This is especially true for software products, which are delivered to many customers and undergo multiple releases, thereby offering ample opportunities for re-design. Available techniques to validate quality attributes either rely on workshops with stakeholders or are based on design-time software artifacts. Many quality attributes, however, are better assessed at runtime when the software system is in operation. In this paper, we present an approach that enables the systematic processing and interpretation of software operation data to gain architectural knowledge about quality attributes. In addition to introducing this approach—which we call Architectural Intelligence—, we present through a case study on an e-Learning environment a formal framework based on process mining that enables the development of second-order information systems for analyzing software operation data to provide architectural intelligence.