Towards Systematic Selection of Architectural Patterns with Respect to Quality Requirements

The design of software architecture for a system-to-be is a challenge, since required functionality as well as the desired quality requirements have to be considered. Building upon common knowledge and best practices captured in architectural patterns has shown to be valuable in this context. However, existing solutions for deriving architectures from requirements mostly rely on experienced architects. Beside the required experience, it is often a problem that the decision is not properly reasoned and documented. In this paper, we propose a process to select appropriate architectural patterns with regards to given (quality) requirements for the system-to-be. The process uses problem frames for modeling requirements and relates requirements to architectural patterns by means of a question catalog. The answers to the questions indicate suitable architectural pattern candidates. The final decision making about the pattern to be used is supported with several steps and also takes tactics and their applicability for a pattern into account. This way, our proposed process connects requirements and architecture, guides even less experienced software engineers through the pattern selection process, provides support for decision making, and makes the decision rationale transparent. The expected target audience for this paper consists of both experienced and less-experienced software architects.