The success of a software project is given by the degree to which it meets the intended purpose.

Requirements Engineering offers ways to discover that purpose, through the identification, specification and documentation of stakeholders and their goals and needs in a form that serves for communication, analysis and implementation. Many of these goals are hard to specify, may conflict among each other, and are difficult to satisfy. Understanding such often-conflicting goals is essential to perform well-informed architectural decisions.

Software architecture design, on the other hand, creates and documents the high-level structure of a software system; at its core it refers to the structure of the software comprising software elements, the externally visible properties of those elements, and the relationships among them.

This course studies the various types of requirements and uses quality attributes and conflict analysis for the derivation of software architectures.

Objective: study the various types of requirements as drivers of the software architecture. Sustainability requirements, non-functional requirements (NFRs) and conflict analysis form the basis for the systematic derivation of the software architecture.

To understand:

• Fundamentals of Requirements Engineering
• Requirements specification and analysis methods
• Fundamentals of software architecture
• Architectural styles and patterns
• Fundamentals for the systematic derivation of software architectures

To know:

• Dealing with the challenges imposed by the size, conflicting goals and poor requirements.
• Understanding the advantages of systematic development and planned reuse.
• Selecting the structure based on a range of possibly disjoint alternatives.

Know how to:

• Apply agile and goal-oriented approaches to identify, specify and validate requirements.
• Identify requirements that contribute to sustainability and to the development of sustainable software systems.
• Use techniques to refine sustainability requirements and NFRs, and resolve conflicts.
• Analyze the architectural choices and choose the most adequate to meet the restrictions imposed by the sustainability requirements and NFRs, promoting the systematic derivation of the architecture.
• Specify software architectures using views, patterns, styles.
• Use architectural description languages and automated tools.

1. Introduction
1.1 The nature and importance of Requirements Engineering
1.2 Requirements as drivers of Software Architecture
1.3 Software Architecture and its importance in software evolution

2. Requirements Engineering Process
2.1 Requirements engineering processes and models
2.2 Requirements Elicitation, Specification and Exploration
2.3 Requirements Analysis and Negotiation(Conflict management and prioritisation)
2.4 Requirements Validation(Inspections, prototypes, model validation and requirements testing)
2.5 Requirements Management
2.6 Requirements documentation standards (e.g., IEEE 830-1998)

3. Requirements Engineering Techniques
3.1 Methods for requirements elicitation(e.g.,Design Thinking, Brainstorming, Checklists)
3.2 Methods for requirements specification(e.g.,Goal-oriented, Object-Oriented)
3.3 Sustainability and non-functional requiremements refinment and operationalization methods
3.4 Goal-based Modelling (intentional organizational modeling)
3.5 Derivation of object-oriented models(mappings between paradigms, models and concepts)

4. Software Architecture Design Fundamentals
4.1 Software Architecture principles
4.2 Mapping requirements to architectural concepts
4.3 Documenting Software Architecture

5. Software Architecture Techniques
5.1 System structuring and modular decomposition
5.2 Architectural views
5.3 Architectural styles and patterns (catalogs of software architectures)
5.4 Architectural description languages
5.5 Architecture evaluation

• An Introduction to requirements Engineering, I. K. Bray, Addison-Wesley, 2002
• K. Wiegers, J. Beatty, Software Requirements,Microsoft Press, 2013
• J.Dick, E. Hull, K. Jackson, Requirements Engineering, Springer-Verlag, 2010
• A. Lamsweerde, Requirements Engineering, Wiley, 2009
• I. Alexander, N. Maiden, Scenarios, Stories, Use Cases: Through the Systems Development Life-Cycle, Wiley, 2004
• G. Kotonya, I. Sommerville, “Requirements Engineering: Processes and Techniques”, Wiley, 1998
• I. Alexander, R. Stevens, “Writing Better Requirements”, Addison Wesley, 2002
• R. N. Taylor, et al, "Software Architecture: Foundations, Theory, and Practice"John Wiley and Sons, 2009
• L. Bass, et al, "Software Architecture in Practice", 2nd edition, Addison-Wesley, 2003
• P. Clements, et al "Documenting Software Architectures: Views and Beyond", Addison-Wesley, 2003.

Software Development Methods

Software Engineering

Domain-Specific Modeling Languages