Structuring the co-design of requirements and architecture

Abstract

The need to co-develop requirements and architectural artefacts, especially for innovative solutions, is widely recognised and accepted. Surprisingly, no comprehensive approach exists to structure the co-design process and to support the stakeholders, requirements engineers, and system architects in co-developing innovative requirements and architectural artefacts. In this paper, we propose a method for the co-design of requirements and architectural artefacts based on two viewpoints, the system usage viewpoint and the system architecture viewpoint. Initially, the two viewpoints are nearly decoupled. The method consists of five sub-processes that support the development of each viewpoint, the comparison of the two viewpoints, the consolidation of the viewpoints, and the definition of detailed system requirements based on the two viewpoints. The consolidation of system usage and coarse-grained system architecture is driven by the refinement of system interaction scenarios into architectural scenarios and the refinement of the associated usage goals. Preliminary results of applying our method in industry are reported. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.