Dimensions of Concerns in Requirements Negotiation and Architecture Modeling

The development and refinement of system requirements into an architecture satisfying those requirements relies heavily on the successful collaboration of stakeholders with different backgrounds, expertise, and responsibilities. Stakeholders involved in this iterative process need comprehensible views that may be provided through multi-dimensional separation of concerns. Stakeholder objectives, constraints, and agreements captured in a requirements negotiation have to be organized e.g., by system features, system properties, or stakeholder contribution. On the other hand in software architecture modeling, components and connectors are the dominant dimensions of concerns used for decomposition. We will discuss dimensions of concerns used in the WinWin requirements negotiation approach and present the CBSP (Connector, Bus, System, Property) taxonomy supporting the classification and refinement of WinWin negotiation results. We will also discuss tools supporting this process.