Integrating Requirement and Architecture Information: A Scenario and Meta-Model Based Approach

Recording and maintaining traces about the history of a (software) product is a prerequisite for managing its evolution. Establishing traceability from requirements down to implementation and vice versa has thus long ago been recognized as an essential development activity. A fundamental problem faced with relating requirements and architectural artefacts is the large conceptual distance and the so-called structural gap between requirements and architectural components. In this paper we argue that the consideration of scenarios at the requirements and at the architectural level empowers a tighter integration of both types of software development artefacts. Briefly, user scenarios are assigned to use cases which in turn are assigned to functional and non-functional requirements. Similarly, architectural scenarios are assigned to architectural configurations which themselves define the allowed interaction between components and connectors defined by the architecture. By interrelating user scenarios and architectural scenarios, use cases and architectural configuration, as well as requirements and architectural definitions both types of artefacts are tightly interrelated. The resulting trace structure facilitates consistent and effective change integration.