A model for analyzing architectural attributes

Even though nothing is ever that simple/clear cut in software engineering, one would argue that by contrast with source code, which represents the detailed functional attributes of a software product, the architecture of a software product represents its non functional attributes. The architecture of a software product determines such attributes as its response time, throughput, reliability, security, maintainability, availability, etc. In this paper we present a model for reasoning about quantitative non functional attributes of software architectures, and discuss our plan to develop automated support for this model.