ANP-GP Approach for Selection of Software Architecture Styles

Selection of Software Architecture for any system is a difficult task as many different stake holders are involved in the selection process. Stakeholders view on quality requirements is different and at times they may also be conflicting in nature. Also selecting appropriate styles for the software architecture is important as styles impact characteristics of software (e.g. reliability, performance). Moreover, styles influence how software is built as they determine architectural elements (e.g. components, connectors) and rules on how to integrate these elements in the architecture. Selecting the best style is difficult because there are multiple factors such as project risk, corporate goals, limited availability of resources, etc. Therefore this study presents a method, called SSAS, for the selection of software architecture styles. Moreover, this selection is a multi-criteria decision-making problem in which different goals and objectives must be taken into consideration. In this paper, we suggest an improved selection methodology, which reflects interdependencies among evaluation criteria and alternatives using analytic network process (ANP) within a zero-one goal programming (ZOGP) model.