Architecture-Based Quality Attribute Synergies and Conflicts

Large or critical software projects often identify particularly-critical quality attributes (QAs), often called non-functional requirements or ilities, and organize Integrated Product Teams (IPTs) to address them. Frequently, the resulting IPT solutions include architectural decisions that address the QA of interest, but seriously conflict with other QAs which are also important but less-well analyzed. These conflicts will often become major sources of significant technical debt and expensive architectural breakage to rectify. As the QA of interest also has synergies with other QAs, the rectification needs to be careful not to undo the synergies. This paper summarizes recent research to develop QA synergies and conflicts matrices that can be used by software system engineers to identify potential areas of concern in balancing a system's QAs.