Software Systems Architecture: Working with Stakeholders Using Viewpoints and Perspectives, Second Edition

14. Evaluating the Architecture

There is always a great sense of achievement as your architectural ideas start to gel into a coherent design for your system. Getting to the point where you have made most of your key architectural decisions means that you have identified possible solutions to most of the major challenges your system faces and that you have designed the key architectural structures for your system. However, at this point you don’t actually know whether or not you have a workable architecture. Just as you don’t know whether your software works correctly just because it compiles cleanly, you don’t know whether your candidate architecture is sound until it has been tested, too. We term the process of testing possible architectures ...