A QoS Driven Development Process Model for Component-Based Software Systems

Non-functional specifications of software components are considered an important asset in constructing dependable systems, since they enable early Quality of Service (QoS) evaluations. Several approaches for the QoS analysis of component-based software architectures have been introduced. However, most of these approaches do not consider the integration into the development process sufficiently. For example, they envision a pure bottom-up development or neglect that system architects do not have complete information for QoS analyses at their disposal. We extent an existing component-based development process model by Cheesman and Daniels to explicitly include early, model-based QoS analyses. Besides the system architect, we describe further involved roles. Exemplary for the performance domain, we analyse what information these roles can provide to construct a performance model of a software architecture.