Jungmin Kim  Sungwon Kang  Jihyun Lee

problem frame architectural pattern Software Architecture Design

While architectural patterns provide software development solutions by providing schemas for structural organizations of software systems based on empirical knowledge, Jackson’s problem frames provide a method of analyzing software problems. Problem frames are useful to understanding the software development problem, by putting emphasis on the problem domain, rather than on the solution space. Research exists that relates problem frames and software architecture, but most of this research uses problem frames only to understand given problems. Moreover, none of the existing research derives architectural patterns by considering both problem frames and quality attributes. In this paper, we propose a software architecture design method for pattern-based architecture design, by matching problem frames and architectural patterns. To that end, our approach first develops the problem model based on the problem frames approach, and then uses it to match with candidate architectural patterns, from the perspectives of both functionality, and quality attributes. Functional matching uses the problem frame diagram to match the problem model of an architectural pattern. We conduct a case study to show that our approach can systematically decide the right architectural patterns, and provide a basis for fine-grained software architecture design.