Methods for Software Architecture Design

Software architecture forms the backbone for any successful software-intensive system. An architecture is the primary carrier of a software system's quality attributes such as performance or reliability. Designing the right architecture is the linchpin for software project success. Designing the wrong one is a recipe for guaranteed disaster.

Methods for Software Architecture Evaluation

How do you know if a software architecture for a system is suitable without having to build the system first?

The answer is to conduct an evaluation of it. A formal software architecture evaluation should be a standard part of the architecture-based software development life cycle. Architecture evaluation is a cost-effective way of mitigating the substantial risks associated with this highly important artifact.

The achievement of a software system's qualities attributes depends much more on the software architecture than on code-related issues such as language choice, fine-grained design, algorithms, data structures, testing, and so forth. Most complex software systems are required to be modifiable and have good performance. They may also need to be secure, interoperable, portable, and reliable. But for any particular system, what precisely do these quality attributes - modifiability, security, performance, reliability - mean? Can a system be analyzed to determine these desired qualities? How soon can such an analysis occur? What happens these quality attributes are in conflict with each other? How can the tradeoffs be examined, analyzed, and captured?

Methods for Software Architecture Documentation

Because architectures are intellectual constructs of enduring and long-lived importance, communicating an architecture to its stakeholders becomes as important a job as creating it in the first place. If the architecture cannot be understood so that others can build systems from it, analyze it, maintain it, and learn from it, then the effort put into crafting it will by and large have been wasted.
Documenting a software architecture is a matter of choosing a set of relevant views of the architecture, documenting each of those views, and then documenting information that applies to more than one view or to the set of views as a whole.