Constructing rigorous models for analysing the behaviour of concurrent and distributed systems is a complex task. Our aim is to facilitate model construction and analysis early in the software process: at the requirements phase. Architectural information used in conjunction with scenario-based model synthesis can support both model construction and elaboration, where the component type behaviour derived from simple architecture fragments can be instantiated in more complex configurations. Software architecture descriptions give the necessary contextual information so that derived component behaviour can be generalised to component type behaviour. The required properties for use in model analysis can be derived from the requirements goals. Thus goals, scenarios, models and software architecture provide the ingredients for what seems to be a satisfying requirements approach.

Professor Jeff Kramer was Head of the Department of Computing at Imperial College from 1999 to 2004. He is currently Head of the Distributed Software Engineering Section. His research work is on behaviour analysis, the use of models in requirements elaboration and architectural approaches to self-organising software systems. He was a principal investigator in the various research projects that led to the development of the CONIC and DARWIN environments for distributed programming and the associated research into software architectures and their analysis. The work on the Darwin Software Architecture led to its commercial use by Philips in their new generation of consumer television products.

Jeff Kramer is a Chartered Engineer, Fellow of the IEE and Fellow of the ACM. He was program co-chair of the 21st ICSE (International Conference on Software Engineering) in Los Angeles in 1999, Chair of the Steering Committee for ICSE from 2000 to 2002. He was associate editor and member of the editorial board of ACM TOSEM from 1995 to 2001 and is currently Editor in Chief of IEEE TSE. He was awarded the IEE Informatics Premium prize for 1998/99, the Most Influential Paper Award at ICSE 2003 and the 2005 ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award Award for significant and lasting research contributions to software engineering. He is co-author of a recent book on Concurrency, co-author of a previous book on Distributed Systems and Computer Networks, and the author of over 150 journal and conference publications.