Engineering Stakeholders' Viewpoint-concerns for Architecting a Modern Enterprise

Stakeholders in an enterprise have diverse concerns from a variety of viewpoints. Designers of the enterprise and its systems elicit, analyze, and engineer stakeholders' viewpoint concerns. Most, if not all, of the stakeholders' concerns, are written in natural language. Ambiguity is omnipresent when it comes to describing viewpoint concerns in natural language. This ambiguity may lead to sub-par requirements for systems design and documenting enterprise blueprints. Many requirements elicitation methods and enterprise architecture frameworks emerged in past decades and gained popularity. None of these linked the viewpoint concerns to natural language lexical and semantic constructs. In this dissertation, we describe English language interrogative investigations and their semantic and lexical relationships to formulate better viewpoint concerns for stakeholders. We included two publications, primarily for waterfall software development lifecycles and monolith applications, one on requirements engineering and the other on enterprise architecture. In the past decade, widespread adoption of agile project management, independent delivery with microservices, and automated deployment with DevOps has tremendously sped up systems development. Microservices are provisioned and accessed via application programming interfaces (APIs). APIs carry business value and have created an API economy for enterprises. The link between stakeholders’ concerns and microservices/APIs is not well captured nor adequately defined. We included a third publication in this dissertation that addresses these issues.Based on the publications included in the dissertation, we created a tool that uses a natural language generation system to auto formulate stakeholder viewpoint concerns for a system.