Software Engineering Institute

This paper presents some of the steps in an emerging architecture tradeoff analysis method (ATAM). The objective of the method is to provide a principled way to understand a software architecture's fitness with respect to multiple competing quality attributes: modifiability, security, performance, availability, and so forth. These attributes can interact or conflict—improving one often comes at the price of worsening one or more of the others, thus it is necessary to trade off among multiple software quality attributes at the time the software architecture of a system is specified, and before the system is developed. This report illustrates typical quality attribute models, analyses, and tradeoffs using a small real-time industrial application.