ARLO: A Tailorable Approach for Transforming Natural Language Software Requirements into Architecture using LLMs
This addresses the time-consuming and error-prone task of manual architecture selection for software engineers, offering a domain-specific solution that is incremental in leveraging existing standards and LLMs.
The paper tackles the problem of mapping verbose and ambiguous natural language software requirements to system architecture by proposing ARLO, an automated approach that uses LLMs to identify architecturally relevant requirements and select optimal architectural choices via integer linear programming, demonstrating efficacy on real-world examples with traceability and influence analysis.
Software requirements expressed in natural language (NL) frequently suffer from verbosity, ambiguity, and inconsistency. This creates a range of challenges, including selecting an appropriate architecture for a system and assessing different architectural alternatives. Relying on human expertise to accomplish the task of mapping NL requirements to architecture is time-consuming and error-prone. This paper proposes ARLO, an approach that automates this task by leveraging (1) a set of NL requirements for a system, (2) an existing standard that specifies architecturally relevant software quality attributes, and (3) a readily available Large Language Model (LLM). Specifically, ARLO determines the subset of NL requirements for a given system that is architecturally relevant and maps that subset to a tailorable matrix of architectural choices. ARLO applies integer linear programming on the architectural-choice matrix to determine the optimal architecture for the current requirements. We demonstrate ARLO's efficacy using a set of real-world examples. We highlight ARLO's ability (1) to trace the selected architectural choices to the requirements and (2) to isolate NL requirements that exert a particular influence on a system's architecture. This allows the identification, comparative assessment, and exploration of alternative architectural choices based on the requirements and constraints expressed therein.