A Quality Based Method to Analyze Software Architectures
In order to produce and develop a software system, it is
necessary to have a method of choosing a suitable software
architecture which satisfies the required quality attributes and
maintains a trade-off between sometimes conflicting ones. Each
software architecture includes a set of design decisions for each
of which there are various alternatives, satisfying the quality
attributes differently. At the same time various stakeholders with
various quality goals participate in decision-making. In this
paper a numerical method is proposed that based on the quality
attributes selects the suitable software architecture for a certain
software.
In this method, for each design decision, different alternatives
are compared in view of a certain quality attribute, and the other
way around. Multi-criteria decision-making methods are used
and, at the same time, time and cost constraints are considered in
decision-making, too. The proposed method applies the
stakeholders’ opinions in decision-making according to the
degree of their importance and helps the architect to select the
best software architecture with more certainty.
Keywords: Software Architecture Evaluation, Quality Attribute, Stakeholder, Design Decision
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