Software Architectures are generally designed with particular functional and nonfunctional requirements. Organizations often need to choose software architecture for future development from several competing candidate architectures. The various stakeholders' quality requirements should be considered collectively to describe the quality requirements of the projected system and therefore build the basis for comparison and selection criteria. Choosing software architecture for any system is still a difficult task as different stakeholders are involved in the selection process. Stakeholders' view on quality requirements differs and at times they can also be conflicting in nature. Existing software architecture selection methods (Svahnberg et al. (2002); Dobrica et al. (2002); Kazman et al. (1998); Kazman et al. (2001)) have been analyzed to identify their limitations. To overcome the limitations and challenges, a selection framework has been proposed and validated based on multiattribute decision-making using Analytic Hierarchy Process (Saaty, 1980). The proposed framework provides rationale for an architecture selection process by comparing the fitness of competing candidate architectures for the envisioned system based on the quality requirements of different stakeholders.

Architecture of a system addresses both functional and non-functional requirements of a system. Functional requirements represent what the system does, and non-functional requirements deals with the quality aspect (Losavio et al., 2003) of the system. Non-functional requirements such as modifiability, performance, reusability, comprehensibility and security are crucial to the software system. These quality requirements should be addressed as early as possible in the software lifecycle and properly built into software architecture before one proceeds for a detailed design. Stakeholders are the ones who are related to the proposed system in one way or the other, viz., end-users, developers, maintenance engineers, architects, business people, etc. Their expectations and requirements are converted into functional and non-functional requirements of the proposed system.