Architecture-driven quality requirements prioritization

Quality requirements are main drivers for architectural decisions of software systems. However, in practice they are often dismissed during development, because of initially unknown dependencies and consequences that complicate implementation. To decide for meaningful, feasible quality requirements and trade them off with functional requirements, tighter integration of software architecture evaluation and requirements prioritization is necessary. In this position paper, we propose a tool-supported method for architecture-driven feedback into requirements prioritization. Our method uses automated design space exploration based on quantitative quality evaluation of software architecture models. It helps requirements analysts and software architects to study the quality trade-offs of a software architecture, and use this information for requirements prioritization.