A complementary approach to requirements engineering—software architecture orientation

Abstract

This paper presents the idea of Software Architecture Oriented Requirements Engineering, a complementary approach to existing requirements engineering processes and methods. The main objective is to introduce concepts and principles of software architecture into requirement analysis and requirement specification, supporting requirement reuse, traceability between requirement specifications and system design, and consistency in the whole software development process more effectively. The paper views connectors as the first-class entities in the problem space, not just in the solution space as most of current research on software architecture does, hence the connector recognition and specification are same important as component recognition and specification in requirements engineering. Based on this idea, the paper presents a new software development process and corresponding requirements engineering process, gives some guidelines for connector recognition, and borrows the notations of software architecture description to specify the functional and behavioural requirements at a high abstraction level. It must be pointed out that the approach presented in this paper is not a substitute for existing ones, but a complement to them from another perspective and at a different abstraction level.

References

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Index Terms

• Social and professional topics

  • Professional topics

    • Management of computing and information systems

      • Software management

• Software and its engineering

  • Software creation and management

    • Designing software

      • Requirements analysis