Scenarios, quality attributes, and patterns: capturing and using their synergistic relationships for product line architectures

Typically, architectural choices determine the achievement of desired goals (such as reusability and maintainability) of product line software development. Several methods have been proposed to design and analyze product line architectures with respect to desired quality attributes. Most of these methods encourage the use of architectural patterns to develop architectures with known characteristics and apply scenarios to evaluate those architectures for desired quality attributes. We observe an increased awareness of the links that exist among scenarios, quality attributes, and patterns. However, there are very few attempts to systematically capture and suitably document such synergistic relationships to support architecture design and evaluation. This paper presents our thoughts on exploiting the above-mentioned synergy. It also proposes some techniques of improving the product line architecture design and evaluation process by identifying and capturing architecturally significant information from architectural patterns.