Abstract

The main concern of this paper is measuring the quality of the architectural design. The goal of this work is to use the architectural design process proposed in the unified process framework, adapting and detailing it to include the quality requirements specification at architectural level. There is general agreement on the fact that in modern applications the selection of the architecture must be addressed early in the development process, to mitigate risks. Moreover, the integration of enterprise applications is a component-based development requiring quality values associated to the services offered by the components. The services depend mostly on the architecture. In consequence, methods arise for guiding the selection or for constructing software architectures. Our approach allows associating the quality requirements (nonfunctional properties) for the architecture expressed using the ISO 9126-1 standard quality model, with the use cases, to facilitate the selection of the “key” use cases. Measures for the architecture's quality characteristics are specified in details, precising attributes, units, numerical systems and scale types. A case study of a real-time application for monitoring stock exchanges illustrates our approach. We hope that our results will be particularly useful for practitioners, such as software architects, analysts and designers.

Author Keywords: Architectural measures; Architectural design; Unified process; Quality model; ISO 9126-1; Quality requirements; Nonfunctional requirements

Corresponding author. Address: Department of Computer Science, Universidad Central de Venezuela, Computer Science, Apartado 47567, Los Chaguaramos, 1041-A , Caracas, , Venezuela. Tel.: +58-212-7536984/6051659; fax: +58-212-7536984

*1 This work is a result of the CEE INCO SQUAD project EP 962019, the CDCH ARCAS project 03.13.4584.00 of the Universidad Central de Venezuela and the Fonacit MOODe project S1-9500512.

¹ Tel.: +58-212-6051659.

² Tel.: +33-1-3925-4312; fax: +33-1-3925-4057.