Conflict-Centric Software Architectural Views: Exposing Trade-Offs in Quality Requirements

Architectural documentation improves the overall understanding of a proposed software system's design, but its true value comes from facilitating the process of satisfying architecturally significant requirements (ASRs). Architectural views are a tool for documenting ASRs in the context of particular quality attributes. Views offer a convenient way to capture architectural decisions, rationales, and alternatives considered. However, when multiple stakeholders have conflicting quality requirements, traditional architectural views tend to scatter their resolutions throughout the documentation.