Business case to architecture in large real time systems

A core part of the Software Engineering Research Centre's research programme is to try and bring all the non-functional requirements for a computer-based system, such as maintainability and reliability, forward to the analysis and design stages. This approach to the '-ilities' has proven to be successful for the ones considered so far. In parallel, the earlier stages of creating an architecture from the original business case for a new system has been under investigation as a natural consequence of progress made on these '-ility' projects. This paper covers the background to the business case approach to architectural design, and the progress and conclusions reached to date.