This paper argues for a set of requirements that an architectural style for self-healing systems should satisfy: adaptability, dynamicity, awareness, autonomy, robustness, distributability, mobility, and traceability. Support for these requirements is discussed along five dimensions we have identified as distinguishing characteristics of architectural styles: external structure, topology rules, behavior, interaction, and data flow. As an illustration, these requirements are used to assess an existing architectural style. While this initial formulation of the requirements appears to have utility, much further work remains to be done in order to apply it in evaluating and comparing architectural styles for self-healing systems. 1

This paper presents an approach for embodying nonfunctional requirements (NFRs) into software architecture using architectural tactics. Architectural tactics are reusable architectural building blocks, providing general architectural solutions for commonly occurring issues related to quality attributes. In this approach, architectural tactics are represented as feature models, and their semantics is defined using the Role-Based Metamodeling Language (RBML) which is a UML-based pattern specification notation. Given a set of NFRs, architectural tactics are selected and composed. The composed tactic is then used to instantiate an initial architecture for the application where the NFRs are embodied. A stock trading system is used to demonstrate the approach. 1

In this paper, we present a prototype tool that supports the systematic development of software architectures driven by quality requirements using architectural tactics. The tool allows one to configure architectural tactics based on quality requirements and compose the configured tactics to produce an initial architecture for the system. We demonstrate the tool for developing an architecture for a resource profiling system in the web environment and validate the results using a set of metrics. Categories and Subject Descriptors