Software architects cannot avoid the consideration of quality attributes when designing software architecture. Architectural styles such as Layers and Client-Server are often used by architects to describe the overall structure and behavior of software. Although an architectural style affects the achievement of quality attributes, these quality attributes are directly performed by design decisions called architectural tactics. While the implementation of an architectural tactic supports a specific quality attribute, it often enhances or hurts other quality attributes in the software. In this paper, a framework for selecting the most appropriate architectural tactics according to their best achievement of the required levels of quality attributes when developing transaction processing systems is proposed. The proposed framework is based on fuzzy measures using Choquet Integral approach and takes into account the impact of architectural tactics on quality attributes, the preferences of quality attributes and the interactions between them. It can also be used to compare different potential architectures in terms of their supporting of quality attributes. The abilities and the advantages of the proposed framework are clarified via practical experiments using a case study.

Evaluating software quality is an important and essential issue in the development process because it helps to deliver a competitive software product. A decision of selecting the best software based on quality attributes is a type of multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) processes where interactions among criteria should be considered. This paper presents and develops quantitative evaluations by considering interactions among criteria in the MCDM problems. The aggregator methods such as Arithmetic Mean (AM) and Weighted Arithmetic Mean (WAM) are introduced, described and compared to Choquet Integral (CI) approach which is a type of fuzzy measure used as a new method for MCDM. The comparisons are shown by evaluating and ranking software alternatives based on six main quality attributes as identified by the ISO 9126-1 standard. The evaluation experiments depend on real data collected from case studies.

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Software architecture is an essential early stage in the software design process. In this stage, the architect should give the quality attributes a special consideration because a good level of meeting these attributes can be performed by well-designed architecture. This means that there is a close relationship between quality attributes and software architecture. However, quality attributes can be achieved through the appropriate application of a set of unit operations. A unit operation is a systematic designing operation that can be applied directly to system architecture. Architectural styles (patterns) include high level design decisions that address quality attributes. Many general architectural styles are defined in the literature. For the domain of user interactive systems there are many architectural styles that address some important quality attributes. In many cases, it is essential to evaluate software styles in terms of their achievement of the required quality attributes by analyzing the relationships between these attributes, unit operations, and styles. This evaluation can help and facilitate the process of selecting a specified style. In this paper the authors propose a structured quantitative evaluation method to show a rank of four wellknown user interface management systems (UIMSs) in terms of their supporting a set of six important selected quality attributes.