Software Engineering Institute

Determining whether a system will satisfy critical quality attribute requirements in areas such as performance, modifiability, and reliability is a complicated task that often requires the use of many complex theories and tools to arrive at reliable answers. This report describes a vehicle for encapsulating the quality attribute knowledge needed to understand a system's quality behavior as a reasoning framework that can be used by nonexperts. A reasoning framework includes the mechanisms needed to use sound analytic theories to analyze the behavior of a system with respect to some quality attribute. This report defines the elements of a reasoning framework and illustrates the reasoning framework concept by describing several reasoning frameworks and how they realize these elements.