The role of software architecture in requirements engineering

The role of software architecture (which reflects high-level implementation constraints) in requirements engineering is clarified by providing perspectives on relevant issues, including the following: is requirements engineering merely a front end to the software development process that is concerned only with problem definition? Is software architecture an application-specific, high-level design of a system (for example, “an object-oriented system with a specified object hierarchy”)? What is the relationship between the problem definition and the solution structure? What is the relationship between the roles of requirements engineer, software architect, and application domain specialist?