Architecture characteristics

Question 1

What part of defining a system is a key responsibility for architects?

Answer 1

Architects may collaborate on defining the domain or business requirements, but one key responsibility entails defining, discovering, and otherwise analyzing all the things the software must do that isn’t directly related to the domain functionality: architectural characteristics.

Question 2

Name three typical ways of uncovering architecture characteristics

Answer 2

Extracting from domain concerns, requirements, and implicit domain knowledge.

Question 3

What is meant by Availability?

Answer 3

Structural. How long the system will need to be available (if 24/7, steps need to be in place to allow the system to be up and running quickly in case of any failure).

Question 4

What is meant by Continuity?

Answer 4

Structural. Disaster recovery capability.

Question 5

What is meant by Performance?

Answer 5

Structural. Includes stress testing, peak analysis, analysis of the frequency of functions used, capacity required, and response times. Performance acceptance sometimes requires an exercise of its own, taking months to complete.

Question 6

What is meant by Recoverability?

Answer 6

Structural. Business continuity requirements (e.g., in case of a disaster, how quickly is the system required to be on-line again?). This will affect the backup strategy and requirements for duplicated hardware.

Question 7

What is meant by Reliability/Safety?

Answer 7

Structural. Assess if the system needs to be fail-safe, or if it is mission critical in a way that affects lives. If it fails, will it cost the company large sums of money?

Question 8

What is meant by Robustness?

Answer 8

Structural. Ability to handle error and boundary conditions while running if the internet connection goes down or if there’s a power outage or hardware failure.

Question 9

What is meant by Scalability?

Answer 9

Structural. Ability for the system to perform and operate as the number of users or requests increases.

Question 10

What is meant by Configurability?

Answer 10

Structural. Ability for the end users to easily change aspects of the software’s configuration (through usable interfaces).

Question 11

What is meant by Extensibility?

Answer 11

Structural. How important it is to plug new pieces of functionality in.

Question 12

What is meant by Installability?

Answer 12

Structural. Ease of system installation on all necessary platforms.

Question 13

What is meant by Leverageability/reuse?

Answer 13

Structural. Ability to leverage common components across multiple products.

Question 14

What is meant by Localization?

Answer 14

Structural. Support for multiple languages on entry/query screens in data fields; on reports, multibyte character requirements and units of measure or currencies.

Question 15

What is meant by Maintainability?

Answer 15

Structural. How easy it is to apply changes and enhance the system?

Question 16

What is meant by Portability?

Answer 16

Structural. Does the system need to run on more than one platform? (For example, does the frontend need to run against Oracle as well as SAP DB?

Question 17

What is meant by Supportability?

Answer 17

Structural. What level of technical support is needed by the application? What level of logging and other facilities are required to debug errors in the system?

Question 18

What is meant by Upgradeability?

Answer 18

Structural. Ability to easily/quickly upgrade from a previous version of this application/solution to a newer version on servers and clients.

Question 19

What is meant by Accessibility?

Answer 19

Cross-Cutting. Access to all your users, including those with disabilities like colorblindness or hearing loss.

Question 20

What is meant by Archivability?

Answer 20

Cross-Cutting. Will the data need to be archived or deleted after a period of time? (For example, customer accounts are to be deleted after three months or marked as obsolete and archived to a secondary database for future access.)

Question 21

What is meant by Authentication?

Answer 21

Cross-Cutting. Security requirements to ensure users are who they say they are.

Question 22

What is meant by Authorization?

Answer 22

Cross-Cutting. Security requirements to ensure users can access only certain functions within the application (by use case, subsystem, webpage, business rule, field level, etc.).

Question 23

What is meant by Legal?

Answer 23

Cross-Cutting. What legislative constraints is the system operating in (data protection, Sarbanes Oxley, GDPR, etc.)? What reservation rights does the company require? Any regulations regarding the way the application is to be built or deployed?

Question 24

What is meant by Privacy?

Answer 24

Cross-Cutting. Ability to hide transactions from internal company employees (encrypted transactions so even DBAs and network architects cannot see them).

Question 25

What is meant by Security?

Answer 25

Cross-Cutting. Does the data need to be encrypted in the database? Encrypted for network communication between internal systems? What type of authentication needs to be in place for remote user access?

Question 26

What is meant by Supportability?

Answer 26

Cross-Cutting. What level of technical support is needed by the application? What level of logging and other facilities are required to debug errors in the system?

Question 27

What is meant by Usability/Achievability?

Answer 27

Cross-Cutting. Level of training required for users to achieve their goals with the application/solution. Usability requirements need to be treated as seriously as any other architectural issue.

Question 28

What is an alternative set of definitions for architectural characteristics?

Answer 28

ISO/IEC 25010

https://iso25000.com/index.php/en/iso-25000-standards/iso-25010