CREATE: A Co-Modeling Approach for Scenario-based Requirements and Component-based Architectures- A Detailed View

Abstract—Requirements engineering and architectural design are key activities for successful development of software-intensive systems and are strongly interrelated. Particularly, in early development stages requirements and architecture decisions are frequently changing. The fundamental problem addressed in this paper is the development of inconsistencies at the itera-tive evolution of requirements and architectures. Inconsistencies between requirements and architectures lead to an incorrect consideration of requirements by the system under development and consequently to unfulfilled requirements. Thus, advanced systematic approaches are needed, which could minimize the risks of wrong early decisions during the iterative evolution of requirements and architectures. Our model-based approach sup-ports the iterative evolution of requirements and architectures by defining a concrete description technique. It provides simplified scenario-based models for a precise description of requirements, which are suitable for validation by stakeholders. Furthermore, the approach provides a component-based model for a precise and entire description of architectures. Strict interrelations be-tween scenario-based and component-based models support the consistence maintenance. These interrelations enable even an automation of this task. In this paper, the model-based approach CREATE is described in all details. For example, all interrelations are introduced completely. Keywords-requirements; architecture; evolution; consistency