Session:Requirements and Design Process--Paper Preview

From WICSA Conference Wiki

GEAR: A Good Enough Architectural Requirements Process

Robert Schwanke, Siemens Corporate Research, Inc.

The GEAR process integrates three approaches to architectural requirements engineering: model-driven requirements engineeering, quality attribute scenarios, and global analysis, within an iterative, incremental analysis process. In so doing, it shows where these methods overlap and where they complement each other. It also adds insight into the differences between product requirements and architecture requirements. GEAR incorporates experience from over a dozen diverse industrial software architecture projects.

Predicting Change Impact in Architecture Design with Bayesian Belief Networks

Antony Tang, Swinburne University of Technology
Yan Jin, Swinburne University of Technology
Jun Han, Swinburne University of Technology
Ann Nicholson, Monash University

Research into design rationale in the past has focused on the representation of reasons and has omitted the connections between design rationales and design artefacts. Without such connections, designers and architects cannot easily assess how changing requirements or designs may affect the system. In this paper, we introduce a model called Architecture Rationale and Element Linkage (AREL) to represent the causal relationship between architecture elements and decisions. We further model AREL as a Bayesian Belief Network (BBN) to capture the probabilistic relationships between architecture elements and decisions in an architecture design model. Such probabilistic modelling enables architects to quantitatively predict and diagnose impact of change when part of the requirements or designs are changing. Using a partial design of a cheque image processing system, we illustrate how AREL is used to represent the decision model and how BBN is used to predict and diagnose change in the architecture design. We use a UML tool to capture the AREL model and a BBN tool to compute the probabilities of change impact.

Generalizing a Model of Software Architecture Design from Five Industrial Approaches

Christine Hofmeister, Lehigh University
Philippe Kruchten, University of British Columbia
Robert Nord, Software Engineering Institute
Henk Obbink, Philips Research Labs
Alexander Ran, Nokia
Pierre America, Philips Research Labs

We compare five industrial software architecture design methods and we extract from their commonalities a general software architecture design approach. Using this general approach, we compare across the five methods the artifacts and activities they use or recommend, and we pinpoint similarities and differences. Once we get beyond the great variance in termi-nology and description, we find that the 5 approaches have a lot in common and match more or less the "ideal" pattern we introduced.