An NFR-Based Framework for Establishing Traceability between Enterprise Architectures and System Architectures

Enterprise Architectures (EA’s) usually capture the information technology architecture of the organization including hardware, software, and networking standardizations, if any, that serves as the basis for all information systems developed within an organization. Usually EA’s are closely aligned to the Strategic Enterprise Plan of the organization. Any information system developed within the organization is derived, on the other hand, from the Strategic Information Systems Plan of the organization. The initial stages of developing an information system, after approval by the executive sponsors, include the scope definition, problem analysis and the requirements analysis phases. It is during the requirements analysis phase that the requirements of the new system are elicited from the stakeholders and analyzed – the analysis includes, among other aspects, the development of candidate system architectures (SA) that considers different ways of allocating the requirements between hardware, software and the network. One way of selecting the optimal architecture among the candidate system architectures is to determine the compliance of the architectures with the enterprise architecture. In this paper we provide a framework, called the Propagatory Framework, for establishing the traceability between SA and the EA that is based on the NFR Approach where NFR stands for Non-Functional Requirement. We demonstrate the practicality of the Propagatory framework by applying it to determine the traceability of the system architectures for a Home Appliance Control System (HACS).