A Reference Architecture for Consumer Electronics Products and its Application in Requirements Engineering

Consumer electronics (CE) products must be appealing to customers, have features that distinguish them in the market and be priced competitively. However, this must be achieved with limited hardware resources, so requirements engineers and architects must work together to specify an attractive product within these constraints. This requires an architectural description from early in development. The creation of this description is hampered by the lack of consensus on high-level architectural concepts for the CE domain and the rate at which novel features are added to products, so that old descriptions cannot simply be reused. This chapter describes both the development of a reference architecture that addresses these problems and the process by which the requirements and architecture are refined together. The reference architecture is independent of specific functionality and is designed to be readily adopted. The architecture is informed by information mined from previous developments and organised to be reusable in different contexts. The interplay between the roles of requirements engineer and architect, mediated through the reference architecture, is described and illustrated with an example of integrating a new feature into a mobile phone.