Illuminating the Fundamental Contributors to Software Architecture Quality

An architectural tactic is a design decision that helps achieve a specific quality-attribute response. Such a tactic must be motivated by a quality-attribute analysis model. This report presents the basic concepts of analysis models for two quality attributes-modifiability and performance, identifies a collection of tactics that can be used to control responses within those models, and discusses how to analyze the models in terms of these tactics. This report also describes how to interpret architectural designs in terms of analysis models and how to apply those models to specific architectures. In addition, it presents the analysis of several different architectural patterns taken from current literature.