Representing structural requirements in software architecture

Software architecture is often intended as a synonym of functional decomposition. Recently, the growing interest in quality factors is pushing software architects to explicitly address issues such as reliability, robustness, and ee-ciency in the early phases of the software process. Also, an eeective software process emphasizes the need for requirement traceability in all phases of development. This paper is a rst step in the direction of representing and tracking structural requirements (i.e., non functional requirements) in the software architecture. A graphical language, based on the Dean and Cordy proposal, is extended to cope with this new issue, and an example of its use is given.