Modeling quality attribute variability

Due to the emerging service orientation of software architectures, the importance of quality aspects and the ability to manage the changing quality requirements of a service have raised the question of how to explicitly define quality requirements and how to assure that quality requirements are defined and handled in the same way by all developers involved in the development of the service. The contribution of this paper is a novel approach, which allows to define metrics for quality attributes as quality ontologies, to specify execution qualities as quality profiles according to a quality variability model and quality ontologies, and to model quality properties as an integrated part of software architecture. The Unified Modeling Language (UML) and its extension mechanisms are used for defining quality profiles. The approach is applied to reliability and security modeling and supported by an integrated tool chain developed on top of the Eclipse platform.