Quality Based Software Architectural Decision Making

Decision making has an important role in the creation of Software Architecture. Such decisions are required throughout the software development life cycle and to attain the quality attributes of a software product. Decisions which are made during architectural design have direct impact on software quality. Many design patterns are available in software architecture and these design patterns help achieve quality attributes in a software product but decision-making for the solution of these design patterns is still an issue. In this paper, a new perspective of selection of design pattern for a given problem is presented. PRIC (Problem, Requirement Identification, Compatible design pattern) model is proposed which helps decision-making of selection of design pattern to attain the required quality attributes. Suitable design patterns are explained in this model for many quality attributes and this model is evaluated with the help of two examples of attaining quality attributes.