Refinement and Evolution Issues in Bridging Requirements and Architectures

Authors: Alexander Egyed, Paul Grünbacher, and Nenad Medvidovic

Though acknowledged as being very closely related, requirements engineering and architecture modeling have been pursued largely independently of one another in the past years. The inter-dependencies and constraints between architectural elements and requirements elements are thus not well-understood and subsequently only little guidance is available in bridging requirements and architectures. This paper identifies a number of relevant relationships we have identified in the process of trying to relate a requirements engineering approach with an architecture-centered approach. Our approach, called CBSP (Component-Bus-System, and Properties) provides an intermediate language for representing requirements in an architectural fashion. In this paper, we will present the basics of our CBSP approach but also emphasize the challenges that still need to be resolved.

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