Reconciling Software Requirements and Architectures with Intermediate Models

Authors: Paul Grünbacher, Nenad Medvidovic, and Alexander Egyed

Little guidance and few methods are available for the refinement of software requirements into an architecture satisfying those requirements. Part of the challenge stems from the fact that requirements and architectures use different terms and concepts to capture the model elements relevant to each. In this paper we will present CBSP, a lightweight approach intended to provide a systematic way of reconciling requirements and architectures using intermediate models. CBSP leverages a simple set of architectural concepts (components, connectors, overall systems, and their properties) to recast and refine the requirements into an intermediate model facilitat-ing their mapping to architectures. Furthermore, the intermediate CBSP model eases capturing and maintaining arbitrarily complex relationships between requirements and architectural model elements, as well as among CBSP model elements. We have applied CBSP within the con-text of different requirements and architecture definition techniques. We leverage that experience in this paper to demonstrate the CBSP method and tool support using a large-scale example.

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