Fundamentals of Software Architecture, 2nd Edition

Chapter 6. Measuring and Governing Architecture Characteristics

Architects must deal with an extraordinarily wide variety of architecture characteristics across all different aspects of software projects. Operational aspects like performance, elasticity, and scalability commingle with structural concerns, such as modularity and deployability. It benefits architects to understand how to measure and govern architectural characteristics, rather than drown in ambiguous terms and broad definitions. This chapter focuses on concretely defining some of the more common architecture characteristics and discusses how to build governance mechanisms for them.

Measuring Architecture Characteristics

Architects struggle to define architectural characteristics for a number of reasons:

They aren’t physics

Many architecture characteristics in common usage have vague meanings. For example, how does an architect design for agility or deployability? What about wicked fast performance? People around the industry have wildly differing perspectives on common terms—sometimes driven by legitimate differing contexts, sometimes accidental.

Wildly varying definitions

Even within the same organization, different departments may disagree on the definitions of critical characteristics such as performance. Until developers, architects, operations, and others can unify on a common definition, how can they have a proper conversation?

Too composite

Many desirable architecture characteristics are really collections ...