Fundamentals of Software Architecture, 2nd Edition

Chapter 5. Identifying Architectural Characteristics

To create an architecture or determine the validity of an existing architecture, architects must analyze two things: architectural characteristics and domain. As you learned in Chapter 4, identifying the correct architectural characteristics (“-ilities”) for a given problem or application requires not only understanding the domain problem, but collaborating with stakeholders to determine what is truly important from a domain perspective.

There are at least three places to uncover what architectural characteristics a project needs: the domain concerns, the project requirements, and your implicit domain knowledge. In addition to generic implicit architectural characteristics, such as security and modularity, we’ve noted that some domains also include implicit architectural characteristics. For example, an architect working on medical software that reads from diagnostics equipment should already understand the importance of data integrity and the potential consequences of losing messages. Architects who work in that domain internalize data integrity, so it becomes implicit in every solution they design.

Extracting Architectural Characteristics from Domain Concerns

Most architectural characteristics come from listening to key domain stakeholders and collaborating with them to determine what is important from a business perspective. While this may seem straightforward, the problem is that architects and domain stakeholders speak ...