Structuring Software Requirements for Architecture Design

Global influence factors, e.g., quality attributes or technical constraints, often guide the process of designing software architectures. However, characteristics of individual requirements (e.g., the complexity or volatility of a requirement) also impact the design of architectures. Consequently, systematically handling the impact of individual requirements on the architecture can facilitate the design of architectures. Thus, we propose a method for identifying architecture-relevant structures in a set of requirements, based on characteristics of individual requirements. These structures provide information about when, where, how and why to implement requirements in the architecture. We use clustering to identify structures in requirements that are not apparent from functional decomposition or aggregation of requirements. Results from a case study show how these structures help with architecture design.