Trade-Off-Oriented Development: Making Quality Attribute Trade-Offs First-Class

Implementing a solution for a design decision that precisely satisfies the trade-off between quality attributes can be extremely challenging. Further, typically quality attribute trade-offs are not represented as first-class entities in development artifacts. Hence, decisions might be sub-optimal and lack requirements traceability as well as changeability. We propose Trade-off-oriented Development (ToD), a new concept to automate the selection and integration of reusable implementations for a given design decision based on quality attribute trade-offs. Implementations that vary in quality attributes and that solve reoccurring design decisions are collected in a design decision library. Developers declaratively specify the quality attribute trade-off, which is then used to automatically select the best fitting implementation. We argue that thereby, software could satisfy the trade-offs more precisely, requirements are traceable and changeable, and advances in implementations automatically improve existing software.