Designing and analyzing software architectures using ABASs

Abstract

This tutorial will discuss, exemplify, and involve the students in the use of Attribute-Based Architectural Styles (ABASs) - architectural styles accompanied by explicit analysis reasoning frameworks - in both the design and analysis of software and system architectures. The tutorial has several objectives: to introduce the students to a catalog of ABASs covering performance, availability, testability, modifiability, and usability; to convince students that ABASs provide a basis for insightful reasoning about a software architecture's ability to meet its quality attribute goals; and to demonstrate the utility of ABASs by showing examples of how ABASs are used to design and analyze real-world system architectures. We will present some large excepts from our growing ABAS handbook and show that ABASs help us in designing architectures efficiently and predictably and in quickly finding architectural risks and tradeoffs when doing analysis.