Framework for Goal Driven System Design

Architecture has been identified as a main tool for high quality system development. It encapsulates the earliest design decisions of the system under development. These decisions constrain heavily the overall design space; therefore it is worth emphasis on the reasons behind architectural choices. Methods for architecting process have been suggested by various researches. Unfortunately, they fail to achieve frameworks that can reason on the strong relationship between general system goals and the decisions that are made to fulfill those requirements. In this paper, we have three major contributions: We introduce a general framework for architectural design cycle. This framework describes an iterative process that assists in transforming system-wide goals into effective architectural description. We show, how the prioritization values among goals and existing legacy have major impact on the resulting architecture. In addition, we demonstrate that the ordering of design decisions greatly affects what kind of structure is created. Investigating the interplay between architecture and design we focus on how we can connect refinement of requirements to the iterative creation of the architecture. Finally, we demonstrate our framework with a small design example. Using the example we exhibit how out approach improves traceability, supports trade-off decisions and explicitly records design rationale.