Towards supporting the architecture design process through evaluation of design alternatives

ABSTRACT

This paper addresses issues involved when an architect explore alternative designs including non-functional requirements; in our approach, non-functional requirements are expressed as state-charts. Non-functional requirements greatly impact the resulting design of a system because they naturally conflict with each other, crosscut the system at multiple points, and may be satisfied in a number of different ways. This makes correctly designing them early in the software lifecycle critical, since correcting them later can be extremely costly. Our approach supports an architect generating and evaluating many different design alternatives. This explorative process is not well supported by current techniques, which focus on documenting the result of this process, but not on assisting the designer during this process. We present an architecture-based approach that supports exploration of non-functional requirements expressed as statecharts. Our approach captures design alternatives of non-functional requirements separately, composes different system designs from these alternatives using a novel weaving technique, and analyzes the resulting design for specific qualities using simulation.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.2 Design Tools and Techniques
          Subjects: State diagrams

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
        D.2.11 Software Architectures
            Subjects: Languages (e.g., description, interconnection, definition)
      D.2.2 Design Tools and Techniques
      D.2.4 Software/Program Verification
          Subjects: Validation

General Terms:
Design, Languages, Verification

Keywords:
analysis, aspect-oriented design, non-functional requirements, simulation, software architecture design, state charts