Reconciling requirements and architectures with the CBSP approach in an iPhone app project

There are only few methods available that help refining software requirements to software architectures. An example is the CBSP (Component-Bus-System-Property) approach that uses general architectural concerns to classify and refine requirements and to capture architectural trade-off issues and options. This paper reports about experiences of applying CBSP in an industrial project in the area of mobile applications. We illustrate CBSP using project examples. We discuss how the approach was tailored and present extensions we developed. In particular, we show how CBSP can be used together with the Goal-Question-Metric approach to guide architectural decisions. We close our paper with a discussion of lessons learned during this project.