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Chapter: Software Architectures : Quality Attribute Workshop

Quality Attribute Workshop

Quality attribute workshops (QAWs) provide a method for analyzing a system’s architecture against a number of critical quality attributes, such as availability, performance, security, interoperability, and modifiability, that are derived from mission or business goals.

QUALITY ATTRIBUTE WORKSHOP

 

Definition

 

Quality attribute workshops (QAWs) provide a method for analyzing a system’s architecture against a number of critical quality attributes, such as availability, performance, security, interoperability, and modifiability, that are derived from mission or business goals. The QAW does not assume the existence of a software architecture. It was developed to complement the Architecture Tradeoff Analysis MethodSM (ATAMSM) in response to customer requests for a method to identify important quality attributes and clarify system requirements before there is a software architecture to which the ATAM could be applied

 

Introduction

 

In software-intensive systems, the achievement of qualities—such as performance, availability, security, and modifiability—is dependent on the software architecture. In addition, quality attributes of large systems can be highly limited by a system’s requirements and constraints.

 

Thus, it is in our best interest to try to determine as early as possible whether the system will have the desired qualities. Quality requirements should be described concretely before an architecture is developed. We distinguish system architecture from software architecture according to the following two definitions:

 

·        system architecture: the fundamental and unifying system structure defined in terms of system elements, interfaces, processes, constraints, and behaviors [INCOSE 96]

 

·        software architecture: the structure or structures of the system, which comprise  software elements, the externally visible properties of those elements and the relationships among them [Bass 03]

 

Development of software-intensive systems begins with a description of the system’s operation and high-level functional requirements, and any constraints on the system, such as legacy or new systems. From these items, the architect derives a system architecture and a software architecture that can then be used to drive detailed design and implementation. (See Figure 1.) The process of creating those architectures is often unstructured.1 Quality attributes could be missing from the requirements document, and even if addressed adequately, they are often vaguely understood and weakly articulated.

The Quality Attribute Workshop (QAW) is a facilitated method that engages system stakeholders early in the system development life cycle to discover the driving quality attributes of a software-intensive system. The QAW is system-centric and stakeholder focused; it is used before the software architecture has been created. The QAW provides an opportunity to gather stakeholders together to provide input about their needs and expectations with respect to key quality attributes that are of particular concern to them.



Both the system and software architectures are key to realizing quality attribute requirements in the implementation. Although an architecture cannot guarantee that an implementation will meet its quality attribute goals, the wrong architecture will surely spell disaster. As an example, consider security. It is difficult, maybe even impossible, to add effective security to a system as an afterthought. Components as well as communication mechanisms and paths must be designed or selected early in the life cycle to satisfy security requirements. The critical quality attributes must be well understood and articulated early in the development of a system, so the architect can design an architecture that will satisfy them. The QAW is one way to discover, document, and prioritize a system’s quality attributes early in its life cycle.

 

It is important to point out that we do not aim at an absolute measure of quality; rather our purpose is to identify scenarios from the point of view of a diverse group of stakeholders (e.g., architects, developers, users, sponsors). These scenarios can then be used by the system engineers to analyze the system’s architecture and identify concerns (e.g., inadequate performance, successful denial-of-service attacks) and possible mitigation strategies (e.g., prototyping, modeling, simulation).


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