An architecture-centric approach for goal-driven requirements elicitation

Abstract

Software system development typically starts from a requirement specification followed by stepwise refinement of available requirements while transferring them into the system architecture. However, the granularity and the amount of requirements to be elicited for a successful architectural design are not well understood. This paper proposes a process concept to support system development with the help of an architecture-centric approach for goal-driven requirements elicitation. The process focuses on multiple quality dimensions, such as performance, reliability and scalability, and at the same time shall reduce costs and risks through early decision evaluation. The main contribution of this paper is a novel process where not only requirements can drive architectural design, but also architectural design can selectively drive requirement elicitation with the help of hypotheses connected to the selected architectural solutions. The paper concludes with a discussion on its possible empirical validation.