Quality-Driven Architecture Development Using Architectural Tactics

This paper presents a quality-driven approach to embodying Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs) into software architecture using architectural tactics. Architectural tactics are reusable architectural building blocks, providing general architectural solutions for common issues pertaining to quality attributes. In this approach, architectural tactics are represented as feature models, and their semantics is defined using the Role-Based Metamodeling Language (RBML) which is a UML-based pattern specification notation. Given a set of NFRs, architectural tactics are selected and composed, and the composed tactic is used to instantiate an initial architecture for the application.