Understanding and representing deployment requirements for achieving non-functional system properties

Deployment requirements describe the precise, desired configuration of a software system. They relate the system's non functional requirements to its architecture, providing a basis for making decisions about design trade-offs in terms of the resulting system's non functional properties. The purpose of this position paper is to propose a research direction towards developing an approach for reasoning about deployment decisions. Its main objective is to quantitatively evaluate and select between different potential architecture solutions in order to shorten customer time-to-value and increase satisfaction. In this paper we analyze the relationship between deployment requirements and non-functional properties, and discuss work in progress of developing a deployment-based methodology for evaluating software architecture.