A quality-driven systematic approach for architecting distributed software applications

Architecting distributed software applications is a complex design activity. It involves making decisions about a number of inter-dependent design choices that relate to a range of design concerns. Each decision requires selecting among a number of alternatives; each of which impacts differently on various quality attributes. Additionally, there are usually a number of stakeholders participating in the decision-making process with different, often conflicting, quality goals, and project constraints, such as cost and schedule. To facilitate the architectural design process, we propose a quantitative quality-driven approach that attempts to find the best possible fit between conflicting stakeholders´ quality goals, competing architectural concerns, and project constraints. The approach uses optimization techniques to recommend the optimal candidate architecture. Applicability of the proposed approach is assessed using a real system.