Linking Quality Attributes and Constraints with Architectural Decisions
This addresses a problem for software architects dealing with complex trade-offs between quality attributes and constraints, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing practices.
The paper tackles the challenge of ensuring architectural decisions respect quality requirements and constraints, presenting Quark, a computer-aided method to support architects in software architecture decision making.
Quality attributes and constraints are among the main drivers of architectural decision making. The quality attributes are improved or damaged by the architectural decisions, while restrictions directly include or exclude parts of the architecture (for example, the logical components or technologies). We can determine the impact of a decision of architecture in software quality, or which parts of the architecture are affected by a constraint, but the difficult problem is whether we are respecting the quality requirements (requirements on quality attributes) and constraints with all the architectural decisions made. Currently, the common practice is that architects use their own experience to design architectures that meet the quality requirements and restrictions, but at the end, especially for the crucial decisions, the architect has to deal with complex trade-offs between quality attributes and juggle possible incompatibilities raised by the constraints. In this paper we present Quark, a computer-aided method to support architects in software architecture decision making.