Software Engineering Institute

This paper presents a method for analyzing systems for nonfunctional qualities from the perspective of their software architecture and applies this method to the field of Internet information systems (IISs). Since nonfunctional qualities tend to be too abstract for comparing systems at the level of their software architecture, the method employs task scenarios as a way of comparing and contrasting the capabilities of different architectures with respect to specific aspects of the quality attributes of interest. Three issues are explored in detail in this paper: generality of the method, repeatability of the method, and the distinction between direct and indirect task scenarios with respect to architectural ramifications.