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This is one of several reports that provide the current status on the work being done by the Software Engineering Institute (SEISM) to understand the relationship between quality requirements and architectural design. The ultimate objective of this work is to provide analysis-based guidance to designers so that the quality attributes of generated designs are more predictable and better understood.

Currently, four distinct problems must be solved to achieve that objective:(1) the precise specification of quality attribute requirements,(2) the enumeration of architectural decisions that can be used to achieve desired quality attribute requirements,(3) a means of coupling one quality attribute requirement to the relevant architectural decisions, and (4) a means of composing the relevant architectural decisions into a design. Embodying the solutions to these four problems into a design method that is sensitive to business …