A Model-Driven Approach for Documenting Business and Requirements Interdependencies for Architectural Decision Making

In business and system requirements analysis, the characteristics of the elements identified are perfectly documented with specific notations and in specific artifacts. However, since these notations are focused on each specific type of element, the interdependencies between elements of different kinds are usually left implicit. These relationships are particularly important during system design in order to evaluate the impact of each requirement and to select the architectural pattern that better satisfies them. To identify and make them explicit, the architect has to analyze all the artifacts generated in depth. Any misinterpretation of these relationships may lead to patterns being selected that can hinder rather than facilitate the satisfaction of the business goals and the system requirements. This paper presents a set of profiles allowing designers to explicitly model these interdependencies in BPMN 2 and UML 2 Use Case diagrams. In addition, ATL transformations are defined to automatically derive these relationships from the business specification to the requirements models, facilitating their analysis by the architect, and thus reducing the risk of misinterpretation.