Quality driven architectural solutions selection approach through measuring impact factors

Abstract

Architecture patterns and tactics are established architectural solutions widely used as design decisions during software architecture design phase. Architecture pattern provides the skeleton of a system by defining the components and connector required to establish the requirements of the system. It also encourages reusing the architecture to many similar systems or family of systems. Moreover, architecture pattern addresses the non-functional requirements of the system by reasoning the quality attributes aimed to achieve. Selection of appropriate architecture pattern has a direct impact on the success of the system and also to the quality factors of the system. Tactics, on the other hand, are fine-grained design decisions which complement architecture pattern in achieving a certain quality of the software system. However, selection of architectural solutions for the target software system can be a complex task because of the varying impact factors of architecture solutions for different quality requirements. Because of the notable impact factor on the overall system, architectural solutions should not be chosen without proven facts. The main aim of this research is to find the best possible way to achieve an appropriate set of architectural solutions. Therefore, we propose an approach to achieve a suitable set of architectural solutions based on the target quality goals. The proposed approach uses quality goals to retrieve a candidate set of architecture solutions and finally achieve an appropriate set of final architectural solutions by omitting conflicting solutions through mapping relationship impact among architectural solutions. Through a comprehensive case study, the effectiveness of the proposed approach is found in achieving an appropriate set of architectural solutions with no negative confliction among the final solutions.