Modelling the Structure of Reusable Solutions for Architecture-Based Quality Evaluation
Axel Busch, Yves Schneider, Anne Koziolek, Kiana Rostami, Jörg Kienzle · 2016
When designing cloud applications many decisions must be made like the selection of the right set of software components. Often, there are several third-party implementations on the market from which software architects have the choice between several solutions that are functionally very similar. Even though they are comparable in functionality, the solutions differ in their quality attributes, and in their software architecture. This diversity hinders automated decision support in model-driven engineering approaches, since current state-of-the-art approaches for automated quality estimation often rely on similar architectures to compare several solutions. In this paper, we address this problem by contributing with a metamodel that unifies the architecture of several functional similar solutions, and describes the different solutions' architectural degrees of freedom. Such a model can be used later to extend the process of reuse from reusing libraries to reusing the corresponding models of these libraries with the lasting benefit of automated decision support at design-time that supports decisions when deploying applications into the cloud. Finally, we apply our approach on two intrusion detection systems.