Software Engineering Institute

Quality attribute requirements such as those for performance, security, modifiability, reliability, and usability have a significant influence on the software architecture of a system. At the Software Engineering Institute, we are studying and codifying the relationship between quality attribute requirements and the architectural design strategies that impact their achievement. In CMU/SEI-2000-TN-017, we introduced the notion of quality attribute design primitives. Quality attribute design primitives (or attribute primitives) are architectural building blocks that target the achievement of one or sometimes several quality attribute requirements. Our intent is to codify a fairly comprehensive set of attribute primitives in a manner that articulates how each attribute primitive makes its specific contribution toward the achievement of one or several attribute goals. We believe this will provide a very powerful language for constructing or analyzing software architectures in relation to quality attribute requirements. To determine the expressive and explanatory power of these attribute primitives, we will examine various classes of systems. This paper uses attribute primitives to examine the qualities of Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB)-based systems. In particular, we find that attribute primitives hold promise for providing insight into the quality attribute consequences of using various EJB infrastructure features.