STREAM-ADD - Supporting the Documentation of Architectural Design Decisions in an Architecture Derivation Process

Abstract

Requirements Engineering and Architectural Design are activities of the software development process that are strongly related and intertwined. Thus, providing effective methods of integration between requirements and architecture is an important Software Engineering challenge. In this context, the STREAM process presents a model-driven approach to generate early software architecture models from requirements models. Despite being a systematic derivation approach, STREAM does not support the documentation of architectural decisions and their corresponding rationale. Recent studies in the software architecture community have stressed the need to treat architectural design decisions and their rationale as first class citizens in software architecture specification. In this paper we define an extension of this process, named STREAM-ADD (Strategy for Transition between Requirements and Architectural Models with Architectural Decisions Documentation). This extended process aims to systematize the documentation of architectural decisions by the time they are made and to support the refinement of the architecture according to such decisions. In order to illustrate our approach, it was applied for creating the architecture specification of a route-planning system.