Categorizing Business Goals for Software Architectures

Business goals are the foundation on which software systems are justified, analyzed, and built. Software systems are constructed to realize business or mission goals. Software architecture is the bridge between the business goals and the realized system. Those claims about business goals underlie many methods for designing and analyzing software architectures. However, precisely eliciting and characterizing business goals has always been problematic. Business goals come in many forms and at many levels of abstraction, and the stakeholders of the system are usually not accustomed to making goals explicit.

This report provides a categorization of possible business goals, so that stakeholders can have guidance in the goals' creation, expression, and documentation. The categorization was derived by mining a set of 190 distinct business goals elicited in 25 Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method (ATAM) evaluations and then by performing an affinity diagram process to group the business goals into categories. For each goal, example scenarios are provided to illustrate how the goal might impact a system. Finally, this report shows how the architecture business cycle (ABC) may be extended by the business goal categorization.

PDF [226 KB]

Authors

Rick Kazman

Len Bass

This report is related to the following area(s) of work:

Software Architecture

Technical Report
CMU/SEI-2005-TR-021
December 2005

Cite This Report

SEI:

Kazman, Rick; & Bass, Len. Categorizing Business Goals for Software Architectures (CMU/SEI-2005-TR-021). Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, 2005. http://www.sei.cmu.edu/library/abstracts/reports/05tr021.cfm

IEEE:

R. Kazman, and L. Bass, "Categorizing Business Goals for Software Architectures," Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Technical Report CMU/SEI-2005-TR-021, 2005. http://www.sei.cmu.edu/library/abstracts/reports/05tr021.cfm

APA:

Kazman, R., & Bass, L. (2005). Categorizing Business Goals for Software Architectures (CMU/SEI-2005-TR-021). Retrieved June 18, 2013, from the Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University website: http://www.sei.cmu.edu/library/abstracts/reports/05tr021.cfm

CHI:

Kazman, Rick, and Len Bass. Categorizing Business Goals for Software Architectures (CMU/SEI-2005-TR-021). Pittsburgh, PA: Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, 2005. http://www.sei.cmu.edu/library/abstracts/reports/05tr021.cfm

MLA:

Kazman, R., & Bass, L. 2005. Categorizing Business Goals for Software Architectures (Technical Report CMU/SEI-2005-TR-021). Pittsburgh: Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University. http://www.sei.cmu.edu/library/abstracts/reports/05tr021.cfm

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