An integrated tool for trade-off analysis of quality-of-service attributes

In this paper, we present a tool for performing trade-off analysis of Quality-of-Service attributes of design solutions resulted from architectural, behavioral, or deployment changes in service-oriented systems. The tool allows for comparing the performance, reliability, and maintainability of such solutions, in an attempt to compute the optimal one with respect to the weighted sum of the considered quality attributes. Our tool uses the Analytic Hierarchy Process for computing these trade-offs and is integrated into the Quality Impact Prediction for Evolving Service-Oriented Software IDE. Consequently, architects and system analysts now have an easy to use tool set for making trade-offs for these system qualities.