From requirements negotiation to software architecture decisions

Architecture design and requirements negotiations are conceptually tightly related but often performed separately in real-world software development projects. As our prior case studies have revealed, this separation causes uncertainty in requirements negotiation that hinders progress, limits the success of architecture design, and often leads to wasted effort and substantial re-work later in the development life-cycle. Explicit requirements elicitation and negotiation is needed to be able to appropriately consider and evaluate architecture alternatives and the architecture alternatives need be understood during requirements negotiation. This paper propose the WinCBAM framework, extending an architecture design method, called cost benefit analysis method (CBAM) framework to include an explicit requirements negotiation component based on the WinWin methodology. We then provide a retrospective case study that demonstrates the use of the WinCBAM. We show that the integrated method is substantially more powerful than the WinWin and CBAM methods performed separately. The integrated method can assist stakeholders to elicit, explore, evaluate, negotiate, and agree upon software architecture alternatives based on each of their requirement Win conditions. By understanding the architectural implication of requirements they can be negotiated more successfully: potential requirements conflicts can be discovered or alleviated relatively early in the development life-cycle.