Specifying and evaluating software Architectures based on 4+1 view model

Software Architecture has a great influence on achieving software quality characteristics of a system, so analysis and evaluation techniques are necessary in the early phase of development processes. In this paper, we propose a technique for describing architectures based on 4 + I View Model in Rational Unified Process, and a technique for quantifying quality characteristics by transforming an architecture description to Coloured Petri Nets (CPNs) and executing it. To show the effectiveness of our techniques, we describe a RMI architecture based on 4+1 view model by using our description technique and transformed it into a set of CPN. We attach the attribute values of the quality characteristics relevant to security, reliability and efficiency (performance and resource efficiency) to the CPNs and simulated them to validate these quality attributes.