Eliciting Architectural Decisions from Requirements using a Rule-based Framework

Making architectural decisions based on requirements, analyzing cost-benefit trade-offs, and keeping design options open is a difficult task. Existing work on classification of architectural styles and features of reusable components, and derivation of relevant architectural styles provides useful heuristics to the task, but it remains to be largely a laborintensive activity. In this paper, we propose a rule-based framework with automated reasoning for eliciting architectural decisions from requirements. Our goal is to gain a deeper understanding of the relationships between requirements and architectural decisions, define generic mappings based on these relationships, and use these mappings to guide architectural design with a higher degree of automation. Keywords Architecture, requirements, mapping, decision elicitation, design guidance, rule-base

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: ICSE
• Authors: WenQian Liu, Steve M. Easterbrook
• Keywords: ICSE 2003, Software Engineering