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

Requirements engineering and architectural design are key activities for successful development of softwareintensive systems. Both activities are strongly intertwined and interrelated. Particularly, in early development stages requirements and architecture decisions are frequently changing. Thus, advanced systematic approaches are needed, which could minimize the risks of wrong early requirements and architectural decisions. The fundamental problem addressed in this paper is the development of inconsistencies at the advanced approaches for co-evolution of requirements and architectures. Inconsistencies lead to an incorrect consideration of requirements by the system under development and consequently to unfulfilled requirements. In this paper, a domain specific model-based approach is presented, which supports the co-evolution of requirements and architectures. The approach provides simplified scenario-based models for the description of requirements, which are suitable for validation by stakeholders. Furthermore, the approach provides a component-based model for a precise and complete description of architectures. Adequate inter-relations between scenariobased and component-based models are defined, which support the consistence maintenance. Keywords-requirements; architecture; evolution; consistency.