Relating System Quality and Software Architecture

Technology.

Preface

Ivan Mistrik; Rami Bahsoon; Peter Eeles; Roshanak Roshandel; Michael Stal

Software architecture is the earliest design artifact that realizes the requirements of the software system. It is the manifestation of the earliest design decisions, which comprise the architectural structure (i.e., components and interfaces), the architectural topology (i.e., the architectural style), the architectural infrastructure (e.g., the middleware), the relationship among them, and their relation to other software artifacts (e.g., detailed design and implementation) and the environment. As an earliest design artifact, a software architecture realizes the qualities of the software system such as security, reliability, availability, scalability, and real-time performance. The architecture can also guide the evolution of these qualities over time, as stand-alone product or across a family of products. Those properties, whether structural or behavioral, can have global impact on the software system. Poor realization and architecting for qualities may regress the software system, threating its trustworthiness and slowing down its evolution. Quality is the degree to which a software product lives up to the modifiability, durability, interoperability, portability, security, predictability, scalability, and other attributes. These qualities translate stakeholders’ expectations when procuring, using, maintaining, and evolving, or even transacting a software system. The realization of these qualities in the architecture and the software product has significant impact on users’ satisfaction, value creation, sustainability, and durability of the software. They also determine the extent to which it can meet its business and strategic objectives. Realizing qualities in the architecture and engineering for qualities in a software product are therefore interlinked, intertwined, and interleaved activities cross-cutting technical, structural, behavioral, environmental, and business concerns.

As the field of software architecture enters its third decade of formal study, it finds itself moving from its traditional and foundational focus on the nature of an architecture in terms of its structure and behavior to the more general notion of software architecture as the set of design decisions made to ensure the software requirements will be met. Consistent with this view is the trend toward focusing software architecture documentation on meeting stakeholder needs and communicating how the software solution addresses their concerns and the business objectives. Often, a software system is not isolated, but a part of a larger system. When making decisions, not only is the quality of the software architecture itself important, but a consideration of the overall quality of the system is warranted. For example, quality attributes such as performance and reliability can only be realized through a combination of software, hardware, and the operating environment (and, if relevant to the system, people).

Quality concerns describe system-level attributes such as reliability, testability, usability, modifiability, performance, security, maintainability, and portability. In conjunction with functional requirements, these quality concerns drive and constrain a system’s architectural design and often introduce significant trade-offs that must be considered and balanced.

The goal of this book is to expand the quality aspects of software architecture, focusing broadly on quality-related characteristics and how these relate to the design of software architectures. In addition to architectural qualities (conceptual integrity, correctness, and completeness), we are including three additional directions that distinguish our book from classical (however excellent) publications on quality of software architectures:

1. We are including Business Qualities (e.g., product lifetime, time to market, roll-out schedule, integration, cost, and benefit) as well as enterprise aspects such as Business Goals, Return on Investment, Economics, and Value Creation, to ensure a comprehensive consideration of quality, thereby supporting the concept of total quality management.

2. We are also including System Quality Attributes (those properties of a system that do not directly relate to the functionality of that system, e.g., modifiability, usability, security, availability, testability, performance) and Nonfunctional Requirements (specific, measurable properties of a system that relate to a quality attribute) in relation to software architecture. Their consideration ensures that the resulting software product addresses these quality attributes, which are strongly influenced by the architecture of the software.

3. From the perspective of technology platforms, we are including recent interest in disruptive technologies and approaches. In particular, we are including cloud, mobile, and ultra-large-scale/Internet-scale architecture as an application focus of this book.

In particular, this book addresses the key elements of System Quality and identifies current challenges in relating System Quality and Software Architecture:

– System Quality Attributes

Software quality, by definition, is the degree to which software possesses a desired combination of attributes [IEEE 19921]. To improve system quality, we pay attention to system quality attributes, such as usability, maintainability, flexibility, reliability, reusability, agility, interoperability, performance, scalability, security, testability, and supportability.

– Defining Quality Requirements

An oft-cited reason for failed software projects is incomplete and/or unclear requirements. This is especially true of nonfunctional requirements and quality requirements in particular. Our focus is on techniques for defining quality requirements. taxonomies of quality attributes. stakeholder interaction when gathering quality requirements. and approaches for prioritizing requirements.

– Addressing System Qualities

The following issues have been identified in addressing system qualities:

system patterns that improve quality: This encompasses tactics for meeting specific quality requirements; system anti-patterns that degrade quality; the tradeoffs necessary when addressing quality requirements (the classic case being a tradeoff between system performance and system flexibility); and different project lifecycles and how they contribute to ensuring that quality attributes are met. Waterfall, iterative, agile, and disciplined agile are examples of project lifecycles.

– Assessing System Qualities

Based on assumptions listed above of how to implement system quality, we are defining the metrics relating to system quality and how these are monitored and tracked throughout the software-development life cycle. The purpose of using metrics is to reduce subjectivity during monitoring activities and provide quantitative data for analysis. We are focusing on approaches for assessing different quality attributes and metrics relevant to an assessment of quality attributes. The IEEE Software Quality Metrics Methodology [IEEE 1992] is a framework for defining and monitoring system-quality metrics and analysis of measurements gathered through the implementation of metrics.

– Current Challenges

Over the past decade many different opinions and viewpoints have been expressed on the terms quality of software architecture, software quality, and system quality. However, no clear consensus has yet emerged. Fundamental questions remain open to debate: how to align software specifications with quality and business goals; what impact the organization developing the software, architectural design decisions, and development processes has on software quality; what interdependencies software quality attributes have among each other; what the exact relationships are between quality of software architecture, software quality, and system quality; what extrinsic relations such as the increase of one property (e.g., performance) diminishing another property (e.g., maintainability) are; what intrinsic interdependencies are, because many quality attributes depend per definition on other quality attributes (e.g., reliability depends on the system's timing behavior in real-time systems); what additional factors (besides architectural design) are that influence software quality attributes; what impact organizational issues (e.g., team structuring and individual software development processes) have as well as implications of the software development process (e.g., quality assurance measures like reviews and the deployment of agile methods) for software quality; how to balance different quality attributes of a system so that they are best aligned to delivering business value for the organization; how to foster the exchange between several areas of research which have been historically divided into different communities (e.g., performance engineering, software reliability, software metrics); and how to assure the alignment of quality and business IT during the entire software development process.

This book provides a collection of perspectives marking one of the first detailed discussions on the theme of relating system quality, software quality, and software architecture. Through these viewpoints we gain significant insight into the challenges of relating system quality and software architecture from experienced software architects, distinguished academics, and leading industry commentators.

We have organized this book into three major sections, with an introductory editorial chapter providing an introduction to the topic of relating system quality and software architecture.

• Part 1: Human-centric Evaluation for System Qualities and Software Architecture explores several of the most basic issues surrounding the task of quality software delivery and the role of stakeholder’s goals.

• Part 2: Analysis, Monitoring, and Control of Software Architecture for System Qualities considers how core architectural ideas impact other areas of quality software delivery such as knowledge management and continuous system delivery.

• Part 3: Domain-specific Software Architecture and Software Qualities offers deeper insight into how quality software architecture issues affect specific solution domains.

As we summarize below, each of the chapters of this book will provide you with interesting and important insights into a key aspect of relating system quality and software architecture. However, more importantly, the comprehensive nature of this book provides us with the opportunity to take stock of how the emergence of quality software delivery practices change our understanding of the critical task of architecting enterprise-scale software systems.

Part 1: Human-centric Evaluation for System Qualities and Software Architecture

Software architecture not only embodies important design decisions about software systems, but also plays a critical role in facilitating communication among stakeholders. While the impact of these design decisions on system quality has been subject of much investigation, it is important to study the role of human stakeholders in evaluating and interpreting architectural design decisions. Over the past few years, specific emphasis on capturing design decisions for different stakeholders has driven much of the research in this area. This part includes three chapters that reflect on the role of stakeholders in capturing and evaluating system quality as it relates to software architecture. The key objectives of these chapters include:

• Studying how different quality-related design decisions are perceived by different stakeholders.

• Focusing on stakeholder perspectives when ensuring the consistency among different views and optimizing functional and quality requirements.

Chapter 2 reports on a study that assesses the perception of software engineers about Attribute Driven Development (ADD) method. Specifically, the authors have focused on the stakeholders’ perception related to the usefulness, ease of use, and willingness to use the ADD method. Chapter 3 motivates the need to harmonize different stakeholders’ views on software quality and present a conceptualized reference framework for the harmonization. Chapter 4 presents a methodology to obtain an optimal set of requirements that contain no conflicts and satisfy stakeholders’ goals and quality requirements.

The Attribute Driven Design (ADD) method provides steps for designing software architecture for satisfying quality attributes. This method has not been explored in terms of users’ perception on its usefulness and ease of use. The goal is to study the perceptions that software engineers with no or little experience industrially in designing software architecture using the ADD. In Chapter 2, Nour Ali and Carlos Solis describe an empirical study that they conducted on master students to measure their perceptions of the ADD after using it. Authors of this chapter performed two experiments: one with students enrolled in the Software Architecture module in 2010 and the second with the students of the same module in 2011. The main findings are that the subjects perceive the ADD method as useful and that there is a relationship between its usefulness and willingness of use. However, the subjects’ opinion was that they did not agree that the ADD method is easy to use. They also discuss several problems that the subjects faced when using ADD.

Chapter 3 by Vladimir A. Shekhovtsov, Heinrich C. Mayr, and Christian Kop summarizes the related state-of-the-art and presents a conceptualization of the process of harmonizing the views on quality possessed by the different sides of the software process. These concepts are based on applying the empirical techniques to the qualitative data obtained from relevant IT companies and are grounded in the set of basic concepts provided by the Unified Foundational Ontology. In particular, the chapter deals with and conceptualizes the following dimensions: the software quality itself and the related aspects as well as their interrelations, in particular, the notion of quality assessment and the concepts utilized in the quality assessment activities; the knowledge about the various stakeholders and the differences in their perception of quality; the knowledge about the activities of the harmonization process and the capabilities of the process participants needed for performing these activities. The proposed conceptualizations could be used as a reference framework for the particular applications in the domain of harmonizing the views on quality; the conceptual models utilized by these tools could be based on these concepts to achieve higher degree of reuse and semantic interoperability.

High-quality software has to consider various quality issues and different stakeholders’ goals. Such diverse requirements may be conflicting, and the conflicts may not be visible at first sight. Moreover, the sheer number of stakeholders and requirements for a software system make it difficult to select a set of requirements sufficient to meet the initial goals. In Chapter 4, Azadeh Alebrahim, Christine Choppy, Stephan Faßbender, and Maritta Heisel propose a method for obtaining an optimal set of requirements that contains no conflicts and satisfies the stakeholders’ goals and quality requirements to the largest possible extent. At first, they capture the stakeholders’ goals and then analyze functional and quality requirements using an extension of the problem frame approach. Afterward, they determine candidates for requirements interaction and derive alternatives in a systematic way. Then they assign values to the different requirements using the Analytic Network Process. Finally, they obtain an optimal set of requirements not containing any conflicting requirements. The authors illustrate their method with the real-life example of smart metering.

Part 2: Analysis, Monitoring, and Control of Software Architecture for System Qualities

As the earliest design artifact, a software architecture realizes the qualities of the software system such as security, reliability, availability, scalability, and real-time performance and manages their evolution over time. Those properties have a global impact on the software system, where any change in users’ requirements or operating environment may regress these qualities, threatening system trustworthiness and slowing down its evolution.

Current research and practice pursue software architectures as the appropriate level of abstraction for evaluating, reasoning about, and managing change and evolution of qualities and their trade-offs in complex software systems. An architecture-based approach for analyzing, reasoning about, and monitoring a system’s qualities is believed to offer the potential benefits of generality (i.e., the underlying concepts and principles are applicable to a wide range of application domains), appropriate level of abstraction to tackle the complexity (i.e., software architecture can provide the appropriate level of abstraction in describing dynamic changes as opposed to algorithmic level), potential for scalability (i.e., facilitating the use in large-scale complex applications), and providing opportunities to facilitate automated analyses benefiting from Architecture Description Languages analyses (ADLs).

Research into analysis, monitoring, and control of software architectures for qualities and their trade-offs has taken two forms: (A) static analysis, where a number of analysis techniques and ADLs have been proposed for modeling and analysis of architectures both within a particular domain and as general-purpose architecture modeling languages. Modeling has primarily been intended to analyze qualities concerned with large, distributed, and concurrent systems. Analysis of architectural qualities upstream, at the architectural level, can substantially lessen the costs of any errors and promote proactivity when designing for dependability. The usefulness of these techniques and ADLs has been directly related to the kind of analyses they tend to support. The ultimate goal is to establish confidence in systems qualities through various means. Examples include analysis of connectors for deadlocks; schedulability analysis for criticality and priority; relative correctness of architectures with respect to a refinement map; use of critics to establish adherence to style rules and design guidelines; enforcement of constraints implicit in types, nonfunctional attributes, component and connector interfaces, and semantic models, etc. Static analysis verifies that all possible executions of the architecture description conform to the specification. Such analyses help the developers to understand the changes that need to be made to satisfy the analyzed properties and to appraise the architecture for meeting its qualities. They span approaches such as reachability analysis, symbolic model checking, flow equations, and data-flow analysis. Dynamic analysis and monitoring for quality, where work has focused on the principles and foundations for enriching the architecture with primitives that can monitor, analyze, plan, and execute decisions that react to feedback loops, emerging from the system and its environment. The ultimate objective has been treating qualities as a moving target and maintaining them through runtime monitors and control. The influx of work on self-* including self-awareness, self-configuration, self-optimization, self-healing, self-protecting, and self-adaptive architectures in specific has advanced our understanding to means of achieving qualities at runtime. Rainbow project of SEI and the Autonomic Manager of IBM are classic examples.

The chapters in this part provide new perspectives and a set of practices and principles for analysis, monitoring, and control of software architecture for qualities.

Chapter 5 by Hong Zhu, Quian Zhang, and Yanlong Zhang proposes a model-based approach called HASARD for the analysis of software quality based on architectural designs. The name HASARD stands for Hazard Analysis of Software Architectural Designs. It adapts the HAZOP hazard identification technique and applies it to software architectural designs to systematically discover the potential quality issues. The identified hazards are then transformed into a graphic quality model to represent how quality attributes and quality carrying properties relate to each other in the particular system. A number of algorithms are developed to analyze the critical design decisions with respect to certain quality concerns, the impacts of a design decision to various quality attributes, the factors that influence a quality attributes, and the trade-off points between a number of contradiction quality properties. The chapter also presents a tool called SQUARE that supports the whole HASARD quality modeling and analysis process and implements the quality analysis algorithms. Finally, the chapter reports a case study with a real e-commerce software system to demonstrate the applicability of the method to real