ACME+: An ADL for Quantitative Analysis of Quality Attributes

Abstract

Abstract.One of the main issue of software systems engineering is determining the overall system quality attributes at an early stage. This has several advantages such as early detection of problems, cost benefits and assuring that the chosen architecture will meet both functional and non-functional quality attributes. One emerging approach for dealing with such early analysis is to evaluate the system quality attributes at the architectural level. However, there is a notable lack of support for representing and reasoning about non functional attributes in existing Architectural Description Languages(ADLs). In this paper, we propose Acme+ as an extension of Acme ADL and discuss its abilities to represent and evaluate non functional attributes such as response time, throughput, failure probability, etc. We also describe a tool that reads a text file containing an architecture described in ACME+ and outputs the quality attributes of all the system and detects the component or the connector bottleneck.