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Appendix D
Decision-Making Techniques
By definition, the architecture of a system is the set of the most important, pervasive, top-level,
strategic decisions, inventions, engineering trade-offs, assumptions, and their associated rationales
concerning how the system and its components collaborate to meet their derived and allocated
requirements. Although a few of these architectural decisions, decisions, and trade-offs can be
made by an individual architect, many will require the collaboration of multiple architects within
a single architecture team or the collaboration of multiple architecture teams. Finally, whereas
many of these architectu