Goal-Oriented Software Architecting

Designing software architectures to meet both functional and non-functional requirements (FRs and NFRs) is difficult as it oftentimes relies on the skill and experience of the architect, and the resulting architectures are rarely derived directly from the requirements models. As a result, the relationships between the two artifacts are not explicitly captured, making it difficult to reason more precisely whether an architecture indeed meets its requirements, and if yes, why. This chapter presents a goal-oriented software architecting approach, where FRs and NFRs are treated as goals to be achieved, which are refined and used to explore achievement alternatives. The chosen alternatives and the goal model are then used to derive, using the provided mapping rules, a logical architecture, which is further mapped to a final concrete architecture by applying an architectural style and architectural patterns chosen based on the NFRs. The approach has been applied in an empirical study based on the 1992 London ambulance dispatch system.

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