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Architectural Requirements

Requirements

Software Architecs must identify and know their scope and requirements, as they are responsible for the outcome. An approach for identifying them is checking quality characteristics, as mentioned in ISO 25010, within given requirement specifications. It is crucial to understand and name influencing factors to those requirements and identify and communicate solutions. Saying “no” or failure is not an option. Keep in mind that certain criteria negatively or positively influence each other. As software architecture starts early, e.g. as part of project initialization phase, any shoot from the hips will have hughe impact. Software architecture also remains longer than projects and must not correlate with the same aims, which makes telling fortunes via heuristic approaches a common discipline.

Influencing Factors

There are many factors, which must be understood and considered for software architecture, as organizations and their software systems normaly correlate:

“… organizations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.”

Melvin Conway, 1968

The following general factors can be differentiated:

Organizational

Organization and Structure

  • Organizational structure of the client
  • Organizational structure of the project team
  • Stakeholder
  • Cooperations
  • Usage of the produced software (internal or for sale)

Technical

  • Hardwareinfrastructure
  • SoftwareInfrastructure
  • Programming Standards (e.g. Patterns)
  • Operations
  • Data structures
  • Reference Architectures (e.g. System Types)
  • Libraries, Frameworks and Components

Product Related

  • Functional Requirements
    Never forget to make implicite requirements explicite
    Non-Functional Requirements (cfg. ISO 25010)

Ressources

  • Timeline and deadlines
  • Functional scope
  • Release plan
  • Budget
  • Team members and their skills

  • Methodology for analysis and blueprints
  • Availability of runtime environments

Organizational Standards

  • Organizational procedure model
  • Quality Standards (e.g. NIST 800-53 / ISO 27.001)
  • Utilities (IDE, Configuration, Versioning)
  • Test Process (e.g. iSTQB)
  • Acceptance and release process (e.g. ITIL 2011)

  • Application Programming Interface (API)
  • Graphical User Interface (GUI)
  • Technical Communication
  • Programming Languages

Legal

  • Liability
  • Data privacy (e.g. GDPR in 05/2018)
  • Obligation to produce proof
  • International legal aspects