Challenges on the Relationship between Architectural Patterns and Quality Attributes

Among other knowledge, software architecture design decision-making relies on the relation between architectural patterns and quality attributes (QAs). However, this relation is often implicit, or in the best case informally and partially defined. This leads to sub-optimal understanding of the impact of the architecture design on the desired level of quality. In this work, we aim to shed light on the relation patterns-QAs in the context of an important architectural mechanism, architectural tactics. Tactics are design decisions that address a specific quality attribute. In turn, the implementation of a tactic has a different impact according to the used pattern. From a previous systematic literature review, we selected and analyzed 13 primary studies with a clear focus on tactics. From our analysis, we extracted three overarching challenges on the relationship patterns-QAs that are yet unsolved by research. The essence of these challenges suggests that further research is needed to identify a clear and precise link between the functional nature of architectural elements and non-functional quality properties.