Towards the Dynamic Reconfiguration of Quality Attributes

Abstract

There are some Quality Attributes (QAs) whose variability is addressed through functional variability in the software architecture. Separately modelling the variability of these QAs from the variability of the base functionality of the application has many advantages (e.g., a better reusability), and facilitates the reconfiguration of the QA variants at runtime. Many factors may vary the QA functionality: variations in the user preferences and usage needs; variations in the non-functional QAs; variations in resources, hardware, or even in the functionality of the base application, that directly affect the product’s QAs. In this paper, we aim to elicit the relationships and dependencies between the functionalities required to satisfy the QAs and all those factors that can provoke a reconfiguration of the software architecture at runtime. We follow an approach in which the variability of the QAs is modelled separately from the base application functionality, and propose a dynamic approach to reconfigure the software architecture based on those reconfiguration criteria.