I. Crnkovic, V. Gruhn, and M. Book (Eds.): ECSA 2011, LNCS 6903, pp. 26–34, 2011. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011 Defining Architectural Viewpoints for Quality Concerns Bedir Tekinerdogan 1 and Hasan Sözer 2 1 Bilkent University, Department of Computer Engineering Bilkent 06800 Ankara, Turkey bedir@cs.bilkent.edu.tr 2 Ozyegin University, Department of Computer Engineering Istanbul, Turkey hasan.sozer@ozyegin.edu.tr Abstract. A common practice in software architecture design is to apply architectural views to model the design decisions for the various stakeholder concerns. When dealing with quality concerns, however, it is more difficult to address these explicitly in the architectural views. This is because quality concerns do not easily match the architectural elements that seem to be primarily functional in nature. As a result, the communication and analysis of these quality concerns becomes more problematic in practice. We introduce a general and practical approach for supporting architects to model quality concerns by extending the architectural viewpoints of the so-called V&B approach. We illustrate the approach for defining recoverability and adaptability viewpoints for an open source software architecture. Keywords: Software Architecture Modeling, Architectural Views, Quality Concerns. 1 Introduction An architectural view is a representation of a set of system elements and relations associated with them to support a particular concern [2]. Having multiple views helps to separate the concerns and as such support the modeling, understanding, communication and analysis of the software architecture for different stakeholders. Architectural views conform to viewpoints that represent the conventions for constructing and using a view. Because of the different concerns that need to be addressed for different systems, the current trend recognizes that the set of views should not be fixed but multiple viewpoints might be introduced instead. Certainly, existing multi-view approaches are important for representing the structure and functionality of the system and are necessary to document the architecture systematically. Yet, an analysis of the existing multi-view approaches reveals that they still appear to be incomplete when considering quality concerns. The ISO/IEC 42010 [4] standard intentionally does not define particular viewpoints to address the different concerns. In the V&B approach, quality concerns appear to be implicit in the different views but no specific viewpoints have been proposed to represent quality concerns. One could argue that for addressing quality concerns software architecture analysis approaches have been introduced. The difficulty here is that these