Comparing methodologies for the transition between software requirements and architectures

The transition from software requirements to software architectures has consistently been one of the main challenges during software development. Various methodologies that aim at helping with this transition have been proposed. However, no systematic approach for assessing such methodologies exists. Also, there is little consensus on the technical and non-technical issues that a transition methodology should address. Hence, we present a method for assessing and comparing methodologies for the transition from requirements to architectures. This method also helps validate newly proposed transition methodologies. The objective of such validations is to assess whether or not a methodology has the potential to lead to better architectures. For that reason, this paper discusses a set of commonly known but previously only informally described criteria for transition methodologies and organizes them into a schema. In the paper we also use our method to characterize a set of 14 current transition methodologies. This is done to illustrate the usefulness of our approach for comparing transition methodologies as well as for validating newly proposed methodologies. Characterizing these 14 methodologies also gives an overview of current transition methodologies and research.