Transition from Requirements to Architecture: A Review and Future Perspective

Elicitation, modeling and analysis of requirements are main challenges during software development. In parallel, software architectures have become a well established area in software engineering research and practice. However, there is still a lack of fundamental process models and guidelines for the transition between the two important phases of requirements engineering and software architectures within the software development cycle. Substantial progress has been separately made in both areas but very little research achievements can be found that address the relation between requirements and architectures. When doing a review on existing methods that try to overcome this gap we realized an urgent need for fundamental research in this area. The paper first presents, compares, classifies and evaluates the suitability of current approaches. Then, evaluation criteria and requirements for a transition methodology are defined. Finally, directions for further research are presented