Software Engineering Institute

In large software systems, the achievement of qualities such as performance, availability, security, and modifiability is dependent not only on code-level practices (e.g., language choice, detailed design, algorithms, data structures, and testing), but also on the overall software architecture. The quality attributes of large systems can be highly constrained by a system's software architecture. Thus, it is in our best interest to try to determine at the time a system's software architecture is specified whether the system will have the desired qualities.

In previous columns we have written about various components of an emerging "software architecture practice" by drawing analogies to architectural engineering and describing approaches to software architecture representation, quality attributes, and the use of scenarios in architecture evaluations. In this column, I describe one way for combining several of these components into a process that allows early insight into a system's architecture, including its quality-attribute sensitivities, tradeoffs, and risks.