Software Architecture Assessment Using Quality Function Deployment

摘要

Today, software applications affect almost every aspect of our lives within all contexts: personal, business or government. Customers who purchase a software application expect a system that satisfies both their functional requirements and their quality expectations. Software architecture is a vital, though often neglected, artifact of the software development lifecycle. It is known that functional requirements that are not incorporated into the system during this phase will normally cost much more to be incorporated in the later phases. Therefore, it is very important to ensure that all functional requirements as well as the quality expectations of the customer are considered in the early phases of the lifecycle, i.e. software architecture. In this paper we exploit a well-know quality tool, Quality Function Deployment, to document and assess proposed software architecture with respect to both functional requirements and internal quality attributes that are important to the success of the system, e.g., coupling and cohesion.