Quality-Oriented Software Product Line Architecture Design

Software architecture design is a critical step of software development. Currently, there are various design methods available and each is focusing on certain perspective of architecture design. Especially, quality-based methods have received a lot of attentions and have been well developed for single system architecture design. However, the use of quality-based design methods is limited in software product line (SPL) because of the complexity and variabilities existing in SPL architecture. In this paper, we introduce an extra view to the Quality-Driven Architecture Design and Quality Analysis (QADA) method, in order to provide a more effective quality-based architecture design framework for SPL. In this framework, the quality attributes of a software system will be taken into account in the early stage of architecture design and the reference architecture of SPL will be elicited based on quality-related consideration.