Architecture Style Selection using Statistics of Quality Attributes to Reduce Production Costs
Hamidreza
Hasannejad Marzooni1, Homayun Motameni2, and Ali
Ebrahimnejad3
1Department of Computer Engineering,
Babol Branch, Islamic Azad University, Babol, Iran
2Department of Computer Engineering,
Sari Branch, Islamic Azad University, Sari, Iran
3Department of Mathematics, Qaemshahr
Branch, Islamic Azad University, Qaemshahr, Iran
Abstract: As time goes by and software systems grow in
complexity and size, there is an increasing need for software architecture as
an important tool in software design. Designing an appropriate architecture is
necessary in producing a high-quality software, which also suits stakeholders.
In order to design the desired high-quality software program, style-based
architectures can be used. That is, with the selection of appropriate style
architecture, we will get an ideal architecture for design. With the same
attitude in this research, using a statistical computational algorithm, we have
attempted to select the appropriate software architecture style to meet
stakeholders’ requirements. In meeting Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs) of
stakeholders, increase of one NFR does not increase the others necessarily, and
they may be at odds with each other, thus the best quality for all cannot be
achieved. In the designing stage of an ideal software, we must take into
account the production and maintenance costs as well as a trade-off between
stakeholders’ desired needs. The proposed algorithm structure involves a method
using Gamma Probability Distribution Function (PDF). In a way that, a
statistical estimate for each present style is created, and finally in the
design of the software, the best style (based on the mentioned statistical
estimate) is used for meeting the stakeholder’s needs. The method not only
creates NFRs in the software program, but also gives importance to production
and maintenance costs. This requires that the qualitative data of the problem
be converted into quantitative data. It will be fully described in the
introduction to the algorithm. In order to verify the validity of the proposed
algorithm, the resulted architecture style ranking will be compared with the
results of alternative methods namely Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and A
Lightweight Value-based Software Architecture Evaluation (LiVASAE). The results
confirm the applicability of the proposed algorithm and moreover it has less
time complexity with respect to other methods.
Keywords: Software architecture style,
non-functional requirements, curve fitting, gamma method.
Received September 13, 2019;
accepted June 18, 2020