Modeling quality attributes in software product line architecture

The main task of the software product line architecture design is to develop the reference architecture which represent the base structure of the member products. Quality-driven Architecture Design and quality Analysis (QADA) is the architecture design method, which has attracted many attentions since it emphasizes on addressing quality issues of the member products at early stage of the system development. In this paper, we introduce two additional views (the quality view and the tradeoff view) to the QADA framework. These extra views will improve the requirements traceability, i.e. it is easier to understand how the requirements on software quality are mapped onto the system architecture, thus will help in developing the concrete architecture for the member products. We have also included a case study to illustrate our approach in details.