Architectural Patterns and Quality Attributes Interaction

Architectural patterns and styles represent common solutions to recurrent problems. They encompass architectural knowledge about how to achieve holistic system quality. The relation between patterns (or styles) and quality attributes has been regularly addressed in the literature. However, there is a lack of a consolidated and systematically built reference capturing this relation and eventually making it available for reuse in the form of patterns-quality attributes knowledge. If captured, this knowledge can be used as an architectural decision framework where solutions (patterns) are strongly intertwined with quality (attributes). Such a framework should also contemplate variants and combinations of patterns. In order to create the framework, we first proposed a lightweight theory on the interaction of patterns/styles and quality attributes. That framework has been built by starting from a key study on the interaction between architectural patterns and quality attributes. We then challenged the theory against the systematic survey of a pilot set of primary studies. This paper presents the preliminary results of this survey on architectural patterns and styles, and their interaction with quality attributes. The preliminary results show that the initial theory can work as a platform for integrating the body of knowledge gathered through the analysis.