Software Architecture Decomposition Using Attributes

Software architectural design has an enormous effect on downstream software artifacts. Decomposition of functions for the final system is one of the critical steps in software architectural design. The process of decomposition is typically conducted by designers based on their intuition and past experiences, which may not be robust sometimes. This paper presents a study of applying the clustering technique to support decomposition based on requirements and their attributes. The approach can support the architectural design process by grouping closely related requirements to form a subsystem or module. In this paper, we demonstrate our experiences in applying the approach to a communication protocol software system.