Qualitative Analysis of the Impact of SOA Patterns on Quality Attributes

Software architecture patterns are proven and reusable solutions to common architecture design problems. One characteristic of architecture patterns is that they affect quality attributes (e.g., performance, reliability). Over the past years, architecture patterns for service-based systems have been proposed. In this paper we report initial findings about the impact of architecture patterns for service-based systems on quality attributes of service-based systems. We related more than 70 SOA patterns from a patterns catalogue to a quality model for service-based systems. Based on the description of the patterns in the catalogue, we characterized the interaction of patterns and quality attributes. We found several patterns which do not seem to explicitly address quality attributes. Our findings can be used to select SOA patterns for architecture design. Also, our findings point to directions for further research: Our preliminary results indicate a mismatch between patterns for service-based systems and quality attributes that are considered important for service-based systems, thus, future work should focus on quality models for service-based systems and on identifying architecture patterns and pattern languages for service-based systems.