Using Business Goals to Inform a Software Architecture

Requirements specifications seldom allow software and system architects to understand the business goals for a system. Architects need that information in order to design an appropriate architecture for the problem at hand. In this paper, we present a lightweight method based on goal oriented requirements engineering that begins with a canonical list of business goals and elicits specific business goals from the perspective of various stakeholders. It then interprets those business goals in terms of the quality attribute requirements that are so important to software architectures. Experience with using this method for a Boeing Air Transport System is presented.