Analysis of Architecturally Significant Requirements for Enterprise Systems

Abstract

In designing and developing enterprise systems, systems engineers must consider the requirements that drive the important architecture decisions. Architecturally significant requirements tend to have a global impact on the underlying software infrastructure, and therefore need to be thoroughly examined. Despite the increasing effort in engineering enterprise systems' requirements, little is known about the analysis of architecture interactions and tradeoffs. In this paper, we propose a framework consisting of an integrated set of activities to help tackle requirements analysis in practice. Specifically, we leverage the quality attribute scenarios to elicit implicit yet significant requirements, to model requirements interplays, to manage terminological interferences, and to determine change impacts. We apply the proposed framework to a customer relationship management software system. The results show that the framework offers concrete insights and can be incorporated into an organization's systems practice with a moderate cost.

Towards the Definition of Enterprise Architecture Debts

“…The metaphor of debt should serve as a common basis for communication and discussion, as well as pointing out differences in as-is situations and proposed ideal tobe situations [31]. The need for such a basis was observed before as [39] identified four possible situations regarding communication:…”

Analysis of the Causes and Level of Maintenance for Enterprise Systems in Construction Companies

“…Previous studies identified factors that may affect maintenance cost (Buchmann et al 2011;Correa et al 2016;Li et al 2010;Nguyen et al 2011;Ren et al 2011a;Tsu-noda et al 2015) and provided methods to estimate the development cost of software (April 2010;Matijevic et al 2012;Ng, Gable 2010;Ren et al 2011b;Salmeron, Lopez 2012;Sarno et al 2015). Several previous studies have proposed a method for the successful implementation of an ES, though these are not directly related to maintenance (Hadidi et al 2017;Niu et al 2013Niu et al , 2014Soja et al 2015;Wu et al 2009;Xu 2011). However, the previous studies did not analyze the causes of maintenance or provide reference criteria for estimation of maintenance costs.…”

“…Niu et al (2013) proposed a scenario method to analyze the impact of the architecture type on satisfying business requirements for the selection of suitable software architecture among the various alternatives. Niu et al (2014) proposed a framework for a significant requirements analysis of an engineering enterprise system based on quality attribute scenarios. The requirements include customizability, flexibility, reusability, extensibility, performance, efficiency, adaptability, autonomy, interoperability, and composability.…”

Guest Editorial Advances of Systems Research in Service Industry

“…Despite the increasing effort in engineering enterprise systems' requirements, little is known about the analysis of architecture interactions and tradeoffs. In the paper by Niu et al [32], the authors propose a framework consisting of an integrated set of activities to help tackle requirement analysis in practice. Specifically, they leverage the quality attribute scenarios to elicit implicit yet significant requirements, to model requirement interplays, to manage terminological interferences, and to determine change impacts.…”