Defining Architectural Viewpoints for Quality Concerns

Abstract

A common practice in software architecture design is to apply architectural views to model the design decisions for the various stakeholder concerns. When dealing with quality concerns, however, it is more difficult to address these explicitly in the architectural views. This is because quality concerns do not easily match the architectural elements that seem to be primarily functional in nature. As a result, the communication and analysis of these quality concerns becomes more problematic in practice. We introduce a general and practical approach for supporting architects to model quality concerns by extending the architectural viewpoints of the so-called V&B approach. We illustrate the approach for defining recoverability and adaptability viewpoints for an open source software architecture.