Conclusion
Designing a software architecture is not just the modeling itself. There are other activities, identified by SAF, that help ensure that the model is usable and that the architecture is successful. But SAF is not a process. When you perform one activity, you should go back over and over to adjust/rethink some of the other ones. The obvious example is that once you evaluate your model, you need to fix it according to the results of the evaluation. Figure 2 illustrates some of the common transitions.
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Figure 2: The SPAMMED process.
In short, SAF is not the end result—it is the starting point. Your role as an architect is to fill each of these activities with meaningful substance relevant to the project at hand.
DDJ
