A Case Study in Systematic Quality-Based Selection of E-Business Architectural Patterns

E-business applications have enabled enterprises to enjoy tremendous growth as a result of automating their dispersed business processes spanning various organizations. This is particularly true for the class of e-business applications pertaining to the e-fmance domain, where business processes are often distributed across various systems maintained by different organizations. An important activity in the development of such applications is to select the most appropriate architectural design, which can possibly be done by evaluating and selecting from a set of predetermined alternatives, in the form of architectural patterns. In previous work, we have identified and formalized a number of e-business architectural patterns, and also modeled few quality attributes for estimating the patterns quality consequences. However, since the selection can be affected by several other quality attributes, it is important to determine a way for incorporating these new quality attributes, as they are needed, in an efficient yet simple way. This paper advocates using a hybrid Multiple-Attribute Decision making (MADM)approach in which modeled and non-modeled quality attributes can be jointly considered. The approach is validated using a real case study from the e-fmance domain.