A Framework for Selecting Architectural Tactics Using Fuzzy Measures

Abstract

Software architects cannot avoid the consideration of quality attributes when designing software architecture. Architectural styles such as Layers and Client-Server are often used by architects to describe the overall structure and behavior of software. Although an architectural style affects the achievement of quality attributes, these quality attributes are directly performed by design decisions called architectural tactics. While the implementation of an architectural tactic supports a specific quality attribute, it often enhances or hurts other quality attributes in the software. In this paper, a framework for selecting the most appropriate architectural tactics according to their best achievement of the required levels of quality attributes when developing transaction processing systems is proposed. The proposed framework is based on fuzzy measures using Choquet Integral approach and takes into account the impact of architectural tactics on quality attributes, the preferences of quality attributes and the interactions between them. It can also be used to compare different potential architectures in terms of their supporting of quality attributes. The abilities and the advantages of the proposed framework are clarified via practical experiments using a case study.