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Economics-Driven Architecting for Non Functional Requirements in the Presence of Middleware

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Relating Software Requirements and Architectures

Abstract

The current trend is to build distributed software architectures with middleware, which provides the application developer with primitives for managing the complexity of distribution and for realizing many of the non-functional requirements like scalability, openness, heterogeneity, availability, reliability and fault-tolerance. In this chapter, we discuss the problem of evolving non-functional requirements, their stability implications and economics ramifications on the software architectures induced by middleware. We look at the role of middleware in architecting for non-functional requirements and their evolution trends. We advocate adjusting requirements elicitation and management techniques to elicit not just the current non-functional requirements, but also to assess the way in which they will develop over the lifetime of the architecture and their economics ramifications. These ranges of requirements may then inform the selection of distributed components technologies, and subsequently the selection of application server products. We describe an economics-driven approach, based on real options theory, which can assist in informing the selection on middleware to induce software architectures in relation to the evolving non-functional requirements. We review its application through a case study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK

    Rami Bahsoon

  2. Department of Computer Science, University College London, London, WC1E 6BT, UK

    Wolfgang Emmerich

Authors
  1. Rami Bahsoon
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  2. Wolfgang Emmerich
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Rami Bahsoon .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Groningen, Nijenborgh 9, Groningen, 9747, Netherlands

    Paris Avgeriou

  2. Faculty of Information, Swinburne University of Technology, PO Box 218, Victoria, 3122, Australia

    John Grundy

  3. The Open University, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, UK

    Jon G. Hall

  4. Dept. Computer Science, Vrije Universiteit, De Boelelaan 1081 A, Amsterdam, 1081 HV, Netherlands

    Patricia Lago

  5. Werderstr. 45, Heidelberg, 69120, Germany

    Ivan Mistrík

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Bahsoon, R., Emmerich, W. (2011). Economics-Driven Architecting for Non Functional Requirements in the Presence of Middleware. In: Avgeriou, P., Grundy, J., Hall, J.G., Lago, P., Mistrík, I. (eds) Relating Software Requirements and Architectures. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21001-3_20

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21001-3_20

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-21001-3

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