Software Architecture Selection Framework Based on Quality Attributes

Software Architectures are generally designed with particular functional and nonfunctional requirements. Organizations often need to choose Software Architecture for future development from several competing candidate architectures. The various Stakeholders´ quality requirements need to be considered collectively to describe the quality requirements of the envisioned system and therefore build the basis for the comparison and selection criteria. Choosing Software Architecture for any system still remains a difficult task as many different stake holders are involved in the selection process. Stakeholders view on quality requirements is different and at times they can also be conflicting in nature. Existing software architecture selection methods [1, 2, 3, 4] have been analyzed to identify their limitations. To overcome the limitations and challenges, a selection framework has been proposed and validated based on multiattribute decision making using Hypothetical Equivalents [7]. The proposed framework provides the rationale for an architecture selection process by comparing the fitness of competing candidate architectures for the envisioned system based on the quality requirements of different Stakeholders.