Systematic integration between requirements and architecture

Abstract

Software systems of today are characterized by increasing size, complexity, distribution and heterogeneity. Understanding and supporting the interaction between software requirements and architectures remains one of the challenging problems in software engineering research. The terminology and concepts used for architectural description are quite different from those used for the requirement specification. In spite of this, there is a clear relationship between requirements and architectures. In this chapter we present an approach for integration of system requirements and software architectures within the context of the Tropos project, an information system development framework that is requirement-driven in the sense that it adopts concepts used during early requirements analysis. Our framework advocates that a software system corresponds to the organizational structure, in which actors are members of a group in order to perform specific tasks. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.