Chapter 4 Traceability in the Co-evolution of Architectural Requirements and Design

Abstract Requirements and architectural design specifications can be conflicting and inconsistent, especially during the design period when requirements and architec-tural design are co-evolving. One reason is that stakeholders do not have up-to-date knowledge of each other’s work to fully understand potential conflicts and incon-sistencies. Specifications are often documented in a natural language, which also makes it difficult for tracing related information automatically. In this chapter, we introduce a general-purpose ontology that we have developed to address this problem. We demonstrate an implementation of semantic wiki that supports trace-ability of co-evolving requirements specifications and architecture design. Let us begin by considering a typical software architecting scenario: A team of business analysts and users work on a new software system in an organization. The business analysts and users document the business goals, use-case scenarios, system and data requirements in a requirements document. The team of software and system architects studie