Requirements Engineering Aspects of a Geographically Distributed Architecture
This work addresses the challenge of systematic requirements engineering for distributed systems across different countries or organizations, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing formal methods without claiming major breakthroughs.
The paper tackles the problem of managing diverse requirements in geographically distributed software systems by presenting a formal framework for analyzing requirements diversity from regulations, laws, and cultural aspects, and providing architectural views and methods for structuring and optimization.
We present our ongoing work on requirements specification and analysis for the geographically distributed software and systems. Developing software and systems within/for different countries or states or even within/for different organisations means that the requirements to them can differ in each particular case. These aspects naturally impact on the software architecture and on the development process as a whole. The challenge is to deal with this diversity in a systematic way, avoiding contradictions and non-compliance. In this paper, we present a formal framework for the analysis of the requirements diversity, which comes from the differences in the regulations, laws and cultural aspects for different countries or organisations. The framework also provides the corresponding architectural view and the methods for requirements structuring and optimisation.