Early quality prediction of component-based systems – A generic framework

Component-based software engineering is currently an emerging technology used to develop complex embedded systems. These embedded systems need to fulfil requirements regarding quality attributes such as safety, reliability, availability, maintainability, performance, security and temporal correctness. Since quality problems should be identified and tackled early in the development process, there is a rising need to predict and evaluate these properties in the architecture design phase. This paper describes a generic framework for predicting quality properties based on component-based architectures, which is derived from a comprehensive study of recent architecture evaluation methods. This generic framework defines common aspects between the different evaluation methods and enables the improvement of evaluation methods for specific quality properties, by transferring knowledge from one quality domain to the other. Thus, this paper can help to create better evaluation methods in the future.