Requirements Engineering Aspects of a Geographically Distributed Architecture

TL;DR

This paper introduces a formal framework for analyzing requirements diversity in geographically distributed systems, addressing legal, regulatory, and cultural differences to improve architecture and development processes.

Contribution

It presents a novel formal framework for requirements analysis that systematically manages diversity in regulations, laws, and cultural aspects across different regions.

Findings

Framework effectively analyzes requirements diversity

Supports architectural decision-making

Enhances compliance and consistency

Abstract

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.