Supporting quality-driven design decisions by modeling variability
Azadeh Alebrahim, Maritta Heisel · 2012
Design decisions should take quality characteristics into account. To support such decisions, we capture various solution artifacts with different levels of satisfying quality requirements as variabilities in the solution space and provide them with rationales for selecting suitable variants. We present a UML-based approach to modeling variability in the problem and the solution space by adopting the notion of feature modeling. It provides a mapping of requirements variability to design solution variability to be used as a part of a general process for generating design alternatives. Our approach supports the software engineer in the process of decision-making for selecting suitable solution variants, reflecting quality concerns, and reasoning about it.