A Quality Based Method to Analyze Software Architectures

In order to produce and develop a s oftware system, it is necessary to have a method of choosing a s uitable software architecture which satisfies the required quality attributes and maintains a trade-off between sometimes conflicting ones. Each software architecture includes a set of design decisions for each of which there are various alternatives, satisfying the quality attributes differently. At the same time various stakeholders with various quality goals participate in decision-making. In this paper a numerical method is proposed that based on the quality attributes selects the suitable software architecture for a certain software. In this method, for each design decision, different alternatives are compared in view of a certain quality attribute, and the other way around. Multi-criteria decision-making methods are used and, at the same time, time and cost constraints are considered in decision-making, too. The proposed method applies the stakeholders’ opinions in decision-making according to the degree of their importance and helps the architect to select the best software architecture with more certainty.