We now delve into the details of structural design, one of the key roles for software architects. This primarily consists of two activities: architectural characteristics analysis, covered in this chapter, and logical component design, covered in Chapter 8. Architects may perform these two activities in any order (or even in parallel), but they come together at a critical join point.
When a company decides to solve a particular problem using software, it gathers a list of requirements for that system (there are many techniques for eliciting them, as covered in Chapter 8). We’ll refer to these requirements as the problem domain (or just the domain) throughout the book. You learned in Chapter 1 that architecture characteristics are the important aspects of a system that are independent from the problem domain and important to the system’s success. In this chapter we’ll dive deeper into defining that term, as well as specific architectural characteristics.
Architects often collaborate on defining the domain, but must also define, discover, and otherwise analyze all the things the software must do that isn’t directly related to the domain functionality: architectural characteristics. Architects’ role in defining architectural characteristics is part of what distinguishes software architecture from coding and design. They must also consider many other factors in designing a software solution, as illustrated in Figure 4-1.
Figure 4-1. ...
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