Designing Software Architecture with Use Case Blocks Using the Design Structure Matrix

Use case driven and architecture-centric approaches have been widely used to develop software systems, which also impose a great demand for a systematic approach to derive software architecture from requirements. To establish software architectures from goals and use cases, we propose, in this work, a software architecture design approach with use case blocks based on design structure matrix (DSM). The approach identifies relations between goals and use cases in the DSM and uses DSM partitioning to group goals and use cases in the blocks to form an initial system architecture which includes subsystems or high level components. The scenarios of the use cases are used to design low level components/classes of the corresponding subsystems/components. The proposed approach is illustrated by a benchmark problem domain of a meeting scheduler system.