elaine--a method to explore the important requirement of architecture with character role-driven

The requirements that are obtained from stakeholders often describe only the expected functionality of the system, without addressing the requirements for system quality such as performance, reliability, portability, and availability. It is often assumed that the system will run as expected, ignoring the need to write these non-functional targets. Unfortunately, stakeholders and developers will assume that they have reached a consensus, but actually have different expectations. Failure to fully understand these quality requirements prior to system design is likely to result in a situation where stakeholder systems are not satisfied with expectations after the system is delivered. Moreover, it is costly to refactor these critical needs later.

Projects with important architectural tradeoffs

Below, I share our recent simple approach to solving this problem. We have a project called Tracelab. At the early stages of the project, we realized that it was difficult to design an architectural solution that would meet the concerns of all stakeholders. Tracelab provides a virtual lab environment in which researchers can design, implement, evaluate, and exchange empirical software engineering experiments (empirical software engineering experiments). Stakeholders in this project require a high-performance, multi-platform solution that dynamically loads executable components written in different languages into Plug and Play environments--and, conservatively, a challenging requirement. In order to design a workable solution, we developed a method flow ¹centered on the character sketch (persona sketch).

These character sketches help us to explicitly capture the needs of the various stakeholders for the quality of the system and to design and evaluate the architectural solutions to meet these requirements. We have used the same approach in another industrial cooperation project. In this project, we have designed and prototyped an enterprise-wide electromechanical integration traceability system. The system uses information retrieval methods to enable engineers to search for related artifacts among multiple distributed third party case tools. For example, both engineers engaged in thermal power model design, or programmers engaged in code development, can query a list of requirements (possibly in the IBM Rational Doors tool) related to an element in their model by opening plug-ins in the Integrated development environment (IDE). As a result, the thermal system needs to have an underlying traceability engine (which can fetch data from a Third-party case tool) and a graphical user interface plug-in (providing interactive functionality) so that the engineer can issue a retrospective query and view the results. We first studied various schemes from push to pull, from centralized to distributed, and then validated these schemes through a series of character sketches.

Play the role of Figure sketch

A persona (persona) represents a fictional character. In the field of human-computer Interaction (HCI), personas are used to support user interaction design. In a typical case, the HCI team first investigates potential users, groups users, and then designs, evaluates, and identifies a set of personas. These personas provide a lens that makes the perception and environment associated with the expected work more prominent by 2. As our projects are agile and we cannot afford to spend weeks or months in advance to create personas, we have launched a series of brainstorming activities to create and validate personas and then confirm that these roles are effective through industry partner feedback.

Figure 11 An architect-savvy persona. This persona vividly depicts a typical user representative that describes the quality requirements in the form of a user story.