What you ask is what you get: Understanding architecturally significant functional requirements

—Software architects are responsible for designing an architectural solution that satisfies the functional and nonfunctional requirements of the system to the fullest extent possible. However, the details they need to make informed architectural decisions are often missing from the requirements specification. An earlier study we conducted indicated that architects intuitively recognize architecturally significant requirements in a project, and often seek out relevant stakeholders in order to ask Probing Questions (PQs) that help them acquire the information they need. This paper presents results from a qualitative interview study aimed at identifying architecturally significant functional requirements’ categories from various business domains, exploring relevant PQs for each category, and then grouping PQs by type. Using interview data from 14 software architects in three countries, we identified 15 categories of architecturally significant functional requirements and 6 types of PQ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: RE
• Authors: Preethu Rose Anish, Maya Daneva, Jane Cleland-Huang, Roel J. Wieringa, Smita Ghaisas
• Keywords: RE 2015, Software Engineering