Leveraging architecture patterns to satisfy quality attributes

Architectural design has been characterized as making a series of decisions that have system-wide impact. These decisions have side effects which can have significant impact on the system. However, the impact may be first understood much later; when the system architecture is difficult to change. Architecture patterns can help architects understand the impact of the architectural decisions at the time these decisions are made, because patterns contain information about consequences and context of the pattern usage. However, this information has been of limited use because it is not presented consistently, nor does it systematically address the typical important quality attributes of systems. We discuss the current limitations of patterns on evaluating their impact on quality attributes, and propose integrating the information of patterns’ impact on quality attributes in order to increase the usefulness of architecture patterns