Abstract
Conference Title: 2016 Qualitative Reasoning about Software Architectures (QRASA) Conference Start Date: 2016, April 5 Conference End Date: 2016, April 8 Conference Location: Venice, Italy Designing a software architecture requires architectural reasoning, i.e., activities that translate requirements to an architecture solution. Architectural reasoning is particularly challenging in the design of product-lines of self-adaptive systems, which involve variability both at development time and runtime. In previous work we developed an extended Architectural Reasoning Framework (eARF) to address this challenge. However, evaluation of the eARF showed that the framework lacked support for rigorous reasoning, ensuring that the design complies to the requirements. In this paper, we introduce an analytical framework that enhances eARF with such support. The framework defines a set of artifacts and a series of activities. Artifacts include templates to specify domain quality attribute scenarios, concrete models, and properties. The activities support architects with transforming requirement scenarios to architecture models that comply to required properties. Our focus in this paper is on architectural reasoning support for a single product instance. We illustrate the benefits of the approach by applying it to an example client-server system, and outline challenges for future work.