Requirements, Architectures and Risks

Wednesday, September 11^th from 9¹⁰ - 10⁴⁰

Modern software processes, like the Rational Unified Process, prescribe iterative approach to software development. One of the fundamental assumptions of an iterative process is that system requirements don't have to be completely understood to commence development. As a matter of fact, one of the main objectives of the initial development is to refine the critical system requirements with the other objective, to create the system architecture.

At first glance the assumption that one can start developing a system without completely understanding its requirements seems paradoxical. However, upon closer inspection requirements can be divided into many categories one of them being the "architecture-significant requirements". This is the understanding of these requirements, the associated development risks, and the system architecture that drive the early iteration of system development.

The presentation will discuss an interesting interplay between architectures, requirements and risks. These are the cornerstones of the iterative software development, yet even experienced teams often find it difficult to identify and isolate the architecturally significant requirements, accurately pinpoint the key risk and address both with a good architectural design.

In addition to describing and discussing the relationships between requirements, architecture and risks, the presentation will attempt to provide a set of simple, and hopefully useful, guidelines for the architects involved in requirements definition.

Wojtek Kozaczynski is the Director of Architectures & Application Frameworks at Rational where he is leading development of software frameworks. He has over 20 years of software development experience including work in architectures, software composition, large-scale software reuse and software tools and processes. He also worked on automatic software understanding and re-engineering, knowledge-bases software engineering and collaborative software development. Over his career Wojtek Kozaczynski held a number of industrial positions and taught at the University of Illinois in Chicago.

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