Architectural design for evolution by analyzing requirements on quality attributes

Abstract

It is important to design architecture to be steady throughout the evolution, or make the architecture to be the platform for a product family. In order to design software architecture to have such characteristics we have to analyze the commonality and differences among requirements on potential software that are supposed to be developed on the architecture, and then design software architecture so as to accommodate the commonality and differences. In this paper, we propose an approach for architectural design in which we analyze the requirements of potential software in terms of the impact on the architecture, considering multiple quality attributes. We perform a case study on an actual project that designed architecture for an on-board system for ITS systems to examine the usefulness of the technique. We also apply the technique to the same architectural design problem to demonstrate that it is applicable to the real problem.