Abstract
The fulfilment of quality requirements is fundamental for the success of software-intensive systems. This fact forces companies to quantify the quality requirements at the moment of their specification, and to evaluate these requirements in all the results of the design process, both the by-products and the end system. The definition of the software architecture is one of the most important and early decisions of the design process, with a strong influence on the final quality of the product; therefore its evaluation should be made as early as possible, before the design is complete. This paper presents a software architecture evaluation model considering the software architecture as a final product itself and also as an intermediate product of the design process.