Relating System Quality and Software Architecture, Preface: Foundations and Approaches

The field of software architecture has gone through significant evolution over the past two decades. Early research in software architecture focused on technological contributions such as the modeling of structural and behavioral properties of software systems. Automated analysis of these models resulted in the development of tools and approaches aimed at ensuring a system's functional and nonfunctional properties such as performance, interoperability, and schedulability. More recently, however, software architecture research has shifted in fundamental ways. The emphasis on capturing design decisions and their relationship to both a software system's requirements and its implementation is predominant. The synergy between the design decisions captured in the software architecture and system quality is the primary motivation behind this book.