Variability and Dependency Modeling of Quality Attributes

Functional Quality Attributes (FQAs) are quality attributes that have strong functional implications and so can be easily modeled by software components. Thus, we use an aspect-oriented software product line approach, to model the commonalities and variabilities of FQAs from the early stages of the software development. However, FQAs cannot be modeled in isolation since they usually have dependencies and interactions between them. In this paper we focus on identifying and modeling the dependencies among different FQAs. These dependencies are automatically incorporated into the final software architecture of the system under development, even when the software architect may be unaware of them.