Activity: Deriving architectural descriptions from goal-oriented requirements

Date: July 7 - August 15, 1999

Location: SRI Intl, Menlo Park (CA)

Beneficiary: Axel van Lamsweerde

Member: Universite Catholique de Louvain

This activity covers a 6-week visit to the SRI Computer Science Lab, Menlo Park, CA. The aim was to discuss principles and techniques for deriving software architectures from functional and non-functional requirements.

The discussions with Bruno Dutertre, Bob Riemenschneider and Vicky Stavidrou were centered around the following themes:

- the derivation of abstract architectures from functional agents elaborated in a KAOS requirements engineering process;

- some patterns for refining architectural components and connectors from goals elaborated in such a process;

- the retrieval, adaptation, and assembly of preexisting components from requirements specifications.

Some preliminaries ideas emerged from there which were validated on two case studies: the Meeting Scheduler and the X/Open Distributed Transaction Processing architecture.

My work on specification inference from operational scenarios was also discussed after a seminar devoted to the topic.

In addition I enjoyed many exciting discussions with members of the Formal Methods group and with summer visitors, including Jo Atlee (on conflict analysis and feature interaction), Joseph Sifakis (on abstraction generation), John Rushby (on mismatches between user and software models), and Jose Fiadeiro (on semantics of actions and agents).

Overall, a very stimulating and inspiring visit.