F-STREAM: A Flexible Process for Deriving Architectures from Requirements Models

Some quality attributes are known to have an impact on the overall architecture of a system, requiring to be properly handled from the early stages of the software development. This led to the creation of different and unrelated approaches to handle specific attributes, such as security, performance, adaptability, etc. The challenge is to propose a flexible approach that could be configured to address multiple attributes of interest, promoting the reuse of best practices and reduction of development costs. We advocate the use of Software Product Line (SPL) principles to manage and customize variability in software processes targeted for the generation of architectural models from requirements models. Hence, in this paper we propose F-STREAM, a flexible and systematic process to derive architecture models from requirements. We define a common core process, its variation and extension points. The definition of this process was performed based on a survey of the existing approaches. As example, we instantiate a process for adaptive systems.