Moving from Quality Attribute Requirements to Architectural Decisions

Quality attribute models are proposed as the linkage between a specification of a quality attribute requirement and a design fragment that is focused on achieving that requirement. Each quality attribute model has a collection of parameters that must be specified in order to determine from the model whether a requirement will be met. These parameters can be bound through design decisions, through values given from a quality requirement, or through knowledge of the designer. Architectural tactics are designed to relate design decisions to control of a quality attribute model parameter in order to achieve particular responses. In this paper, we present a series of steps that enable moving from a single quality attribute requirement to a design fragment focused on achieving that requirement. We demonstrate these steps through application to an embedded system.