Software Systems Architecture: Working with Stakeholders Using Viewpoints and Perspectives

14 Validating The Architecture

There is always a great sense of achievement associated with the completion of the first draft of an AD. Reaching this point normally means that you have identified possible solutions to most of the major challenges your system faces and that you have designed a candidate architectural structure 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 for a system architectural validation.

In the architectural validation ...