Exploring Quality Attributes Using Architectural Prototyping

A central tenet of software architecture design is to base this on a formulation of desired quality attributes, such as buildability, performance, and availability of the target system. Thus there is a need for architectural evaluation—ensuring the architecture’s support for desired quality attributes—and a variety of evaluation techniques have been developed, described, and used. Architectural prototyping is an experimental approach that creates executable ‘skeleton’ systems to investigate architectural qualities of a future system. Architectural prototyping is a learning vehicle for exploring an architectural design space as well as an evaluation technique. The contribution of this paper is to explore the evaluation aspect of architectural prototypes from an analytical standpoint. We present an analysis and discussion of architectural prototyping in the context of two well-established quality frameworks. Our analysis concludes that architectural prototyping is a viable evaluation technique that may evaluate architectural quality attributes and especially valuable in cases where the balance between opposing qualities must be assessed.