What you ask is what you get: Understanding architecturally significant functional requirements

Abstract

Software architects are responsible for designing an architectural solution that satisfies the functional and nonfunctional requirements of the system to the fullest extent possible. However, the details they need to make informed architectural decisions are often missing from the requirements specification. An earlier study we conducted indicated that architects intuitively recognize architecturally significant requirements in a project, and often seek out relevant stakeholders in order to ask Probing Questions (PQs) that help them acquire the information they need. This paper presents results from a qualitative interview study aimed at identifying architecturally significant functional requirements' categories from various business domains, exploring relevant PQs for each category, and then grouping PQs by type. Using interview data from 14 software architects in three countries, we identified 15 categories of architecturally significant functional requirements and 6 types of PQs. We found that the domain knowledge of the architect and her experience influence the choice of PQs significantly. A preliminary quantitative evaluation of the results against real-life software requirements specification documents indicated that software specifications in our sample largely do not contain the crucial architectural differentiators that may impact architectural choices and that PQs are a necessary mechanism to unearth them. Further, our findings provide the initial list of PQs which could be used to prompt business analysts to elicit architecturally significant functional requirements that the architects need.

Stimulating architectural thinking during requirements elicitation : an approach and tool support

“…This approach is used in social sciences to construct general propositions (called a 'theory' in this approach) from textual data. This study is published in [33,34]. The key findings of this study are: (1) SRSs often lack crucial architecturally relevant information needed to make informed architectural decisions, (2) PQs are an essential mechanism for unearthing underspecified architecturally relevant information, (3) identification of a total of 15 categories of ASFRs, each with its own set of PQs, (4) and there is a logical way to sequence the PQs during the requirements elicitation process.…”

“…The majority of the research presented in this dissertation has been published previously. The chapters are based on the following publications [33,34,35…”

“…This chapter details the qualitative studies that we carried out to understand how architects perceive ASFRs, which categories of ASFRs exist in the covered domains, what kind of information is discoverable using Probing Questions (PQs) and how do SAs use these PQs to infer and explicate hidden architectural impact. This chapter is largely based on two publications [33] and [34].…”

“…The study presented in this chapter is motivated by the findings from our previous qualitative interview-based study [33,34] that we described in chapter 4. For the benefit of the reader, we briefly summarize the studies from our previous chapter here.…”

“…For the benefit of the reader, we briefly summarize the studies from our previous chapter here. Our previous study [34] explored current practices for working with ASFRs as perceived by 24 SAs from large organizations in India, the United States and the Netherlands. The participating SAs were from the domains of Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI), Healthcare, Retail, Government, Telecommunications, and Airlines Management.…”