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Business Intent Integration and Traceability

Vision Driver

The future vision expands CAS from a decision-driven architecture system into an Architecture Intelligence Platform that connects business intent, architecture, code, and decisions. It specifically calls for ingestion of business requirements, business cases, portfolio definitions, and strategic objectives, then tracing business requirements through ADRs, patterns, and code.

Current State

CAS has an emerging Architecture Work Registry and a knowledge layer for architecture work, decisions, patterns, maps, and intent. The current diagrams show business stakeholders providing intent and requirements to CAS, but the project does not yet define a governed capability for extracting business intent signals or linking those signals through the architecture knowledge model.

Desired Future State

CAS should represent business intent as governed architecture knowledge that can be traced to patterns, ADRs, architecture work, implementation structure, and runtime behavior. Architects should be able to ask which architectural decisions support a business capability and receive evidence-backed traceability.

Evolution Gap

The gap is a missing business-intent model, ingestion workflow, and traceability relationship contract. Current knowledge artifacts can hold architecture evidence, but they do not yet provide a first-class path from business inputs to architecture decisions and downstream implementation evidence.

Why This Matters

Business intent integration gives CAS strategic relevance beyond architecture documentation. Architecturally, it anchors decisions in business drivers. From a governance perspective, it improves decision justification and review context. Operationally, it makes change impact easier to reason about across business, architecture, and implementation layers.

Expected Outcomes

  • Business intent signals become governed architecture inputs.
  • Architecture Work and ADRs can reference business drivers explicitly.
  • Traceability queries can connect business requirements to patterns, decisions, and code evidence.
  • Governance review gains clearer evidence for why architectural choices matter.

Dependencies

  • Architecture Work Registry
  • Knowledge Provider
  • ADR lifecycle
  • Pattern relationship model
  • Future code intelligence capability

Vision Evidence

The vision asks how to connect business intent to architecture and implementation, defines Business Layer Integration as a capability domain, and identifies end-to-end traceability from business to decision, pattern, code, and runtime behavior as a cross-cutting capability.

Define the minimal business intent knowledge model and identify the first governed ingestion workflow that can convert business artifacts into Architecture Work without introducing implementation design.