Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani

SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURE

Assignment
Section: C
Team No: 5

Topic: Online Cab Booking System

SL.No Team Members Bits-email

1 Leenu Thomas [email protected]
2 Ajeemsha Vn [email protected]
3 Ajith R [email protected]
4 Filna Rodrigues [email protected]
5 Amal Baby [email protected]
6 Archana Das [email protected]
 Online Cab Booking System

Architectural Pattern for Online Cab Booking system:

We have chosen the above Architectural pattern, which will help others to
understand the working flow of the online cab booking system. This pattern clearly showed
how the User will book the cab, how to sign up, how to provide the pickup and drop
locations, etc. New User will register his/her number in the application. Then, login to
application. Make sure the user provided both pick-up and drop location. The system will
estimate the arriving time, destination arrival time and the rate to pay for the cab. If the User
is eligible for any offers or promotions, it will apply. Nearby cabs will be searched by the
system and if any cabs are available, the system will displays the Cab/drivers details to the
User. Payment can be through Paytm or card or cash. The cab will drop you in the
destination location and End of the Trip. This is the brief understanding will get from the
architectural pattern given above.
 Quality Attribute for Online cab booking system:

The main quality attribute required in online cab booking system is;

1) Availability
2) Modifiability
3) Performance

1) Availability:

A failure occurs when the system no longer delivers a service that is consistent with
its specification; this failure is observable by the system's users. A fault (or combination of
faults) has the potential to cause a failure. Recall also that recovery or repair is an important
aspect of availability. Fundamentally, availability is about minimizing service outage time by
mitigating faults.

In Online cab booking system, the availability required are Riders/cabs, hardware and
software. If these are not available, this system can lead to a fault/failure.

Tactics for Availability:

 2) Modifiability:

Modifiability is the degree of ease at which changes can be made to a system,

and the flexibility with which the system adapts to such changes. It supports the
communication between software architects and software engineers since it captures the
earliest and most important design decisions. Modification will happens as per the
requirement change and deployments.

In Online cab booking system, the modifiability required are Application developers, testers
and admins. If the requirements changed and the code changes affects the existing
functionality, and the testers couldn’t find it. Then, the application is a fault/failure.

Tactics for Modifiability:

3) Performance:

Performance is about time and the software system’s ability to meet timing
requirements. When events occur – interrupts, messages, requests from users or other
systems, or clock events marking the passage of time – the system, or some element of the
system, must respond to them in time. Characterizing the events that can occur (and when
they can occur)

and the system or element’s time-based response to those events is the essence is discussing
performance.

The goal of performance tactics is to generate a response to an event arriving at the system
within some time constraint. The event can be single or a stream and is the trigger for a
request to perform computation. It can be the arrival of a message, the expiration of a time
interval, the detection of a significant change of state in the system's environment, and so
forth. The system processes the events and generates a response. Performance tactics control
the time within which a response is generated.
In Online cab booking system, the modifiability required are Customers, network
connections and other external systems. When the Customer is available and try to connect
to cab booking system, if the network is not available at that time, it can be failure.

Tactics for Performance:

Introduction on Online cab booking system:

Online cab booking system is a software which is most trusted and reliable for the
travel business, which help both cab drivers and the passengers. The passengers can book the
cab to a particular destination from his/her current location in this system. The passenger can
view how many cabs are available nearby them and if the cab is booked, he/she can view
how much time the cab will take to reach at their current locations. The passengers can
schedule his/her cab with a specific route and for a specific day. The passengers can view the
cab driver details and contact numbers, after booking the trip. After the trip, bill is generated
and send to both cab driver and the passenger.

There are mainly six modules in this software:

1) Admin
2) HR manager
3) Maintenance manager
4) Movement manager
5) Finance manager
6) Quality Assurance manager

In this online cab booking system, Admin is responsible for the creation and
maintenance of the accounts to the system, also responsible for the creation of different kind
of managers and looks after the maintenance of these accounts. HR manager is responsible
for registering the employees for the cab facilities and after registering, he/she will assign the
shift and batches to the employee’s/cab drivers. Also maintenance of cab drivers profile,
shifts and batches are taken care by HR manager in this system. Maintenance manager is
responsible for maintaining and adding vehicles, drivers, vendors of the vehicles, spare part
details of the cab and its billing.

Movement manager is responsible for the maintenance of the driver shift details,
route details, trip sheets and Vehicle allocated details. Finance manager is responsible for the
cost estimation of the vendor, vehicle billing and viewing the feedbacks posted by the
employees on the events as accidents and the driving nature of a particular vehicle/cab
drivers. Quality Assurance Manager is responsible for inserting and maintaining the
Accident details, by this details he requests for the finance manager to provide the Amount
to the damage.

Online cab booking system is most trusted and reliable for the travel business,
which help both cab drivers and the passengers. The passengers can book/schedule the cab
and can view the details of the cab drivers and also can view the arrival time of the cab to the
passenger’s current location. The passengers can view the estimated price of the trip and can
provide the feedback/rating of the particular trip. This system also helps the cab
drivers/employees to view the shift details, batch details, passenger contact details, cab
routes, billing details, working status, etc. This project intends to introduce more user-
friendly approach in the various activities such as record updating, maintenance, and
searching. This system will works between the passengers and the cab drivers and used for
benefiting the passengers and to provide detailed information regarding Cab routes and cab
driver details.

Learning goals of the research topic:

Online Cab Booking system is an online portal through which customers can view
available cabs, register the cabs, view profile and book cabs. A computer based management
system is designed to handle the entire primary Information required to manage the whole
data. Separate database is maintained to handle all the details required for the correct
statement calculation and generations. This project intends to introduce more user-friendly
approach in the various activities such as record updating, maintenance, and searching.
Researching on this project, we have gone through Software Architecture, all the Quality
attributes, all types of diagrams, tactics, etc. An architecture pattern allows us to define a
guide for the ‘architecture’ of a software system, making it scalable, maintainable and
testable. Differing from design patterns, these have a major abstraction level.

First, you need to understand what’s the meaning of every component of this architecture
and this will helpful for getting concepts from the next patterns that are going to be mention
on this article.

 Model: contains models of business logic, i.e. the classes that will model the solution
for the problem and objective of the application. For example, if you are developing
an app for a library, the ‘Book’, ‘Author’ and ‘PublishingHouse’ classes should be in
this package. All of them should be independent from any Android component.

 View: is an interface that is going to be implemented by all the UI views, that’s it.
Activities, Fragments, Adapters, Dialogs, etc. All of these are in this package and are
responsible on displaying the data to the user.

 Controller: is responsible for ‘listening’ user inputs and update the model and
the view. Normally, the view and controller are involved in the same java class, I
mean, an activity accomplish the functions as a view and controller at the same time
because it is listening (for example) user clicks and shows answers for them. The best
idea is to have the controller in a separate class. However, this relationship makes the
activity hard to test because the Testability best practice is not being used and we have
user interactions and view responses at the same class. Moreover, the view and the
controller can both access to the Model, which is not a good practice at the end
because you have the model relationship with more than one class and this is not (too)
scalable.
Some of the quality attributes:

Availability, Modifiability, Performance, Security, Testability, Usability.

Availability:

Availability is concerned with system failure and its associated consequences. A

system failure occurs when the system no longer delivers a service consistent with its
specification. Such a failure is observable by the system's users—either humans or other
systems. A failure occurs when the system no longer delivers a service that is consistent with
its specification; this failure is observable by the system's users. A fault (or combination of
faults) has the potential to cause a failure. Recall also that recovery or repair is an important
aspect of availability. Fundamentally, availability is about minimizing service outage time by
mitigating faults.

Modifiability:

Modifiability is the degree of ease at which changes can be made to a system, and the
flexibility with which the system adapts to such changes. It supports the communication
between software architects and software engineers since it captures the earliest and most
important design decisions. Modification will happens as per the requirement change and
deployments.

Performance:

Performance is about timing. Events (interrupts, messages, requests from users, or the
passage of time) occur, and the system must respond to them. One of the things that make
performance complicated is the number of event sources and arrival patterns. A performance
scenario begins with a request for some service arriving at the system. Satisfying the request
requires resources to be consumed. While this is happening the system may be
simultaneously servicing other requests. An arrival pattern for events may be characterized
as either periodic or stochastic. Performance is to generate a response to an event arriving at
the system within some time constraint. The event can be single or a stream and is the trigger
for a request to perform computation. It can be the arrival of a message, the expiration of a
time interval, the detection of a significant change of state in the system's environment, and
so forth. The system processes the events and generates a response. Performance tactics
control the time within which a response is generated.

Security:

Security is a measure of the system's ability to resist unauthorized usage while still
providing its services to legitimate users. Security can be characterized as a system
providing nonrepudiation, confidentiality, integrity, assurance, availability, and auditing.

a) Nonrepudiation is the property that a transaction (access to or modification of data or

services) cannot be denied by any of the parties to it.
 b) Confidentiality is the property that data or services are protected from unauthorized
access.
c) Integrity is the property that data or services are being delivered as intended.
d) Assurance is the property that the parties to a transaction are who they purport to be.

e) Availability is the property that the system will be available for legitimate use.
f) Auditing is the property that the system tracks activities within it at levels sufficient to
reconstruct them.

Testability:

Software testability refers to the ease with which software can be made to demonstrate
its faults through testing. Testability refers to the probability that it will fail on its next test
execution. For a system to be properly testable, it must be possible to control each
component's internal state and inputs and then to observe its outputs.

Usability:

Usability is concerned with how easy it is for the user to accomplish a desired task and
the kind of user support the system provides. It can be broken down into the following areas:

a) Learning system features. If the user is unfamiliar with a particular system or a

particular aspect of it, what can the system do to make the task of learning easier?
b) Using a system efficiently. What can the system do to make the user more efficient in
its operation?
c) Minimizing the impact of errors. What can the system do so that a user error has
minimal impact?
d) Adapting the system to user needs. How can the user (or the system itself) adapt to
make the user's task easier?
e) Increasing confidence and satisfaction. What does the system do to give the user
confidence that the correct action is being taken?
Summary:

Software Architecture

Architecture serves as a blueprint for a system. It provides an abstraction to manage

the system complexity and establish a communication and coordination mechanism among
components.
 It defines a structured solution to meet all the technical and operational
requirements, while optimizing the common quality attributes like performance and
security.
 Further, it involves a set of significant decisions about the organization related to
software development and each of these decisions can have a considerable impact on
quality, maintainability, performance, and the overall success of the final product.
These decisions comprise of −
o Selection of structural elements and their interfaces by which the system is
composed.
o Behaviour as specified in collaborations among those elements.

o Composition of these structural and behavioral elements into large subsystem.

o Architectural decisions align with business objectives.
o Architectural styles guide the organization.

The primary goal of the architecture is to identify requirements that affect the
structure of the application. A well-laid architecture reduces the business risks associated
with building a technical solution and builds a bridge between business and technical
requirements.

Some of the other goals are as follows −

 Expose the structure of the system, but hide its implementation details.
 Realize all the use-cases and scenarios.
 Try to address the requirements of various stakeholders.
 Handle both functional and quality requirements.
  Reduce the goal of ownership and improve the organization’s market position.
 Improve quality and functionality offered by the system.
 Improve external confidence in either the organization or system.

Quality attribute requirements such as those for performance, security, modifiability,

reliability, and usability have a significant influence on the software architecture of a system.
Architects need to understand their designs in terms of quality attributes. For example, they
need to understand whether they will achieve deadlines in real time systems, what kind of
modifications are supported by their design and how the system will respond in the event of
a failure. There are large and thriving attribute communities that study various quality
attributes but they each have their own language and sets of concepts. However, architects
tend to think in terms of architectural patterns. What the architect needs is a characterization
of architectural patterns in terms of factors that affect the various quality attributes so that a
software design can be understood in terms of those quality attributes.

Quality is a measure of excellence or the state of being free from deficiencies or

defects. Quality attributes are the system properties that are separate from the functionality
of the system. Implementing quality attributes makes it easier to differentiate a good system
from a bad one. Attributes are overall factors that affect runtime behavior, system design,
and user experience.

They can be classified as –

Static Quality Attributes
Reflect the structure of a system and organization, directly related to architecture,
design, and source code. They are invisible to end-user, but affect the development and
maintenance cost, e.g.: modularity, testability, maintainability, etc.

Dynamic Quality Attributes

Reflect the behaviour of the system during its execution. They are directly related to
system’s architecture, design, source code, configuration, deployment parameters,
environment, and platform.
They are visible to the end-user and exist at runtime, e.g. throughput, robustness, scalability,
etc.

Quality attributes types (ISO/IEC FCD 25010 diagram)

To consider the types of quality attributes, we can use a diagram from ISO 25010:
This standard describes the quality attributes of a software product.

Common Quality Attributes

The following table lists the common quality attributes a software architecture must have –

Category Quality Attribute Description

Design Qualities Conceptual Defines the consistency and coherence

Integrity of the overall design. This includes the
way components or modules are
designed.

Maintainability Ability of the system to undergo changes

with a degree of ease.

Reusability Defines the capability for components

and subsystems to be suitable for use in
other applications.

Run-time Qualities Interoperability Ability of a system or different systems

to operate successfully by
 communicating and exchanging
information with other external systems
written and run by external parties.

Manageability Defines how easy it is for system

administrators to manage the
application.

Reliability Ability of a system to remain operational

over time.

Scalability Ability of a system to either handle the

load increase without impacting the
performance of the system or the ability
to be readily enlarged.

Security Capability of a system to prevent

malicious or accidental actions outside
of the designed usages.

Performance Indication of the responsiveness of a

system to execute any action within a
given time interval.

Availability Defines the proportion of time that the

system is functional and working. It can
be measured as a percentage of the total
system downtime over a predefined
period.

System Qualities Supportability Ability of the system to provide

information helpful for identifying and
resolving issues when it fails to work
correctly.

Testability Measure of how easy it is to create test

criteria for the system and its
components.

User Qualities Usability Defines how well the application meets

 the requirements of the user and
consumer by being intuitive.

Architecture Quality Correctness Accountability for satisfying all the

requirements of the system.

Portability Ability of the system to run under

different computing environment.

Integrality Ability to make separately developed

components of the system work
Non-runtime Quality
correctly together.

Modifiability Ease with which each software system

can accommodate changes to its
software.

Business quality Cost and schedule Cost of the system with respect to time
attributes to market, expected project lifetime &
utilization of legacy.

Marketability Use of system with respect to market

competition.

Performance shows the response of the system to performing certain actions for a certain
period.

There are two ways how to measure performance:

 Latency: Time spent on responding to an event

 Channel capacity. The number of events that occur at a certain point in time.

In practice, the possible performance indicators include, for example:

 Average/maximum number of system users per time unit.
 Average page load time.
 Average method execution time.
 Performance issues very often grow into problems that can affect everything, from the
server’s capacity or how you develop your front-end to the efficiency of database queries or
the capacity of communication channels.
Performance is almost always included in the list of critical quality attributes that need to be
considered by the architect since it affects the entire system and can affect many parts of the
architectural solution

Interoperability is an attribute of the system or part of the system that is responsible for its
operation and the transmission of data and its exchange with other external systems. A well-
designed system facilitates integration with third-party systems. To improve the
interoperability, you can use well-designed external interfaces, standardization systems, etc.

Naturally, there are a lot of problems for interaction:

 Outdated external systems.

 Different formats of data in similar external systems.
 Different versions of the API in external systems.
 Backward compatibility of the API for integration.
 Poor quality and lack of standards of external systems.

Interoperability cannot be ignored. In the best case, you will have to create additional layers
for the interaction API. At worst, it will be necessary to rebuild the entire system.

Usability is one of the most essential attributes, because, unlike in cases with other
attributes, users can see directly how well this attribute of the system is worked out. One of
the critical problems of usability is too much interaction or too many actions necessary to
accomplish a task. Incorrect sequences of steps in multistage interfaces are also a problem of
usability. Data elements and controls may be designed not according to the accepted patterns
of user experience, which also complicates the interaction.

Examples of important indicators for this attribute are:

 List of supported devices, OS versions, screen resolutions, and browsers and their
versions.
 Elements that accelerate user interaction, such as “hotkeys,” “lists of suggestions,” and
so on.
 The average time a user needs to perform individual actions.
 Support of accessibility for people with disabilities.

Reliability is an attribute of the system responsible for the ability to continue to operate
under predefined conditions. Most often, the system fails due to the inaccessibility of
external elements, such as databases, systems, and network connections.

Availability is part of reliability and is expressed as the ratio of the available system time to
the total working time. Important indicators for this attribute are:
  Availability.
 Planned downtime.
 The time needed to update the software, and so on.

Availability is often expressed in the number of nines after the comma that is nines of
availability (hours / minutes / seconds):

 2 9’s (99%) = up to 87.6h / 5256.0m / 315360.0 seconds of downtime per year.

 3 9’s (99.9%) = up to 8.76h / 525.6m / 31536.0 seconds of downtime per year.
 4 9’s (99.99%) = up to 0.876h / 52.559999999999995m / 3153.6 seconds of downtime
per year.
 5 9’s (99.999%) = up to 0.0876h / 5.256m / 315.36 seconds of downtime per year.
 6 9’s (99.9999%) = up to 0.00876h / 0.5256000000000001m / 31.536 seconds of
downtime per year.
 7 9’s (99.99999%) = up to 8.76E-4h / 0.05256m / 3.1536 seconds of downtime per
year.

Security is responsible for the ability of the system to reduce the likelihood of malicious or
accidental actions as well as the possibility of theft or loss of information. Several measures
are used to protect systems: authentication, encryption, audit, and others.

Examples of this attribute in the work of the system are:

 The ability of the system to detect DDoS attacks and respond to them.
 Restrictions of user access by authentication/authorization.
 Prevention of SQL injection.
 Encryption of passwords and content.
 Secure connection.

Maintainability is the ability of the system to support changes. Changes can be related to
new business requirements or the correction of old errors and affect system components or
separate methods. Also, maintainability affects the time needed to restore the system after a
failure. Excessive dependencies between components have a very negative effect on
maintainability. In programming, there is a notion of anti-pattern spaghetti code, which
means excessive coherence in the code. In architecture, there is no such thing, but
architecture is very close to programming in this sense. It is because of the maintainability
attribute that such concepts as separation of responsibility, microservice architectures, and
modularity have appeared. At the same time, this attribute affects not only development
processes but also management processes (for example, splitting teams into product-related
parts).

Modifiability determines how many common changes need to be made to the system to
make changes to each item. The ideal is the case where each change affects only one
element.
Testability shows how well the system allows performing tests, according to predefined
criteria. In addition to testing performance, testability makes it possible to effectively divide
the system into subsystems.

The main indicators for this attribute are:

 Percentage of coverage with modular, integration, or unit tests.

 The final list of required test environments as well as the final list of used approaches
to testing (manual/automatic, regression, integration, etc.).

Scalability is the ability of the system to handle load increases without decreasing
performance, or the possibility to rapidly increase the load.

There are two ways to improve scalability:

 Vertical: To increase, we add more resources, such as memory, disks, or processors
into one system.
 Horizontal: We increase the number of computing units and divide the load.

The key indicators for measuring this attribute are:

 If the system allows for horizontal scaling.

 The time needed to increase scaling, in seconds.
 Scaling limitations: the number of servers or the network capacity.
 Possibility to scale: the increase in the number of transactions or the amount of
content.

And this is only a small part of the indicators which you need to follow when designing.
Scalability is one of the most essential attributes, no matter what is the project’s stage.

Reusability is a chance of using a component or system in other components/systems with

small or no change. Segregation of responsibilities, modularization, decreasing of copy-paste
are all about reusability. Copying code, or worse, using different components for the same
result in different modules, is one of the biggest problems of reusability.

Supportability is the ability of the system to provide useful information for identifying and
solving problems. The main issues in ensuring supportability can be addressed with the
following means:

 No diagnosis: How the activity and performance of the system are controlled. It
includes various types of logging.
 No tools for troubleshooting: This includes backups, various systems for creating
snapshots of the system, and tools for auditing the system. When the system fails, it is
always more pleasant to wait for an automatic restart than to solve the issue manually.
 No health checking: This includes a variety of systems for measuring compilation
time, deployment time, database size, or mobile application size.
Most often these are not considered in start-ups or small projects initially. The cost of
maintaining the supportability attribute is high, and the result is only visible on a large scale.
However, with the growth of the team and the product, this attribute becomes one of the
important ones.

Methods used for learning:

We have used below methods for our learning:

 Google
 Test books
 Reference books
 Youtube
 Recorded sessions
 Contact sessions notes

List all the references you have used top learn:

1) https://sites.google.com/site/misresearch000/home/software-architecture-quality-
attributes
2) https://www.slideshare.net/rickkazman/sap3-chapter-8
3) http://www.users.abo.fi/lpetre/SA11/SALecture2.pdf
4) http://www.ece.ubc.ca/~matei/EECE417/BASS/ch05lev1sec4.html
5) http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1959673&seqNum=5
6) http://www.se.rit.edu/~swen-440/slides/instructor-specific/Kuehl/Lecture
%2017%20Quality%20Attributes%20and%20Tactics%20LV.pdf
7) https://elearn.bits-pilani.ac.in/user/
8) https://www.cs.unb.ca/~wdu/cs6075w10/sa2.htm
Conclusion

The development of this project took efforts to understand how Cab Booking systems
work in order to facilitate their daily businesses. Information Technology plays a vital role
not only in a particular field, it provides various kinds of solutions and services to the
various problems prevailing in many fields. Cabs exploits information technology at the
maximum extent. It uses the information technology in an efficient way for providing better
passenger services.
Moreover it helped us to understand more on software architecture and its various
quality attributes and related tactics on it. Also it reminded us, how Software Architecture
plays a vital role in day to day life.