Framework for goal driven system design

Architecture has been identified as a main tool for high quality system development. It encapsulates the earliest design decisions of the system under development. However, these decisions heavily constrain the overall design space; therefore it is worth emphasising the reasons behind architectural choices. Methods for architecture have been suggested by various research. Unfortunately, they fail to achieve frameworks that can reason about the strong relationship between general system goals and the decisions that are made to fulfill those requirements. In this paper, we have three major contributions: (i) we introduce a general framework for the architectural design cycle. This framework describes an iterative process that assists in transforming system-wide goals into effective architectural description that satisfies the main requirements. (ii) We show how the prioritizations among goals and environmental constraints have a major impact on the resulting architecture. In addition, we demonstrate that the ordering of design decisions greatly affects what kind of structure is created. We describe how properties of earlier design decisions constrain the available design space and the concerns emerging from the current design guide selection of the next design choices. (iii) We investigate how this framework can be adapted in a concrete design example. We conclude that using this model can improve traceability, support trade-off decisions and record design rationale.