The goals of developing systems better, faster, and cheaper continue to drive software engineering practitioners and researchers to investigate software engineering methodologies that are novel, yet practical. As the size and complexity of systems continues to grow, there has been a growing interest in the investigation of social paradigms (e.g., agent- and goal-oriented approaches) and the use of COTS components. These are being viewed more and more as promising, and also perhaps inevitable, solutions to this problem. The effective application of social paradigms and use of COTS components, however, requires a systematic approach that provides a set of concepts for modeling the subject matter, a set of guidelines for using such concepts, and tool support to assist the developer. In this paper, we present part of a COTS-Aware Requirements Engineering and Architecting (CAREA) approach that explicitly supports the use of COTS components. Our CAREA approach, an extension of our previous work in system and software requirements engineering, is agent- and goal-oriented, knowledge based, and has a defined process. In particular, we present part of the process that supports the formal definition of a software architecture. Our CAREA approach is validated using a Digital Library System example; a prototype of the CAREA Assistant tool is used to present some of our preliminary results.
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