Architecture characteristics Flashcards
What part of defining a system is a key responsibility for architects?
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.
Name three typical ways of uncovering architecture characteristics
Extracting from domain concerns, requirements, and implicit domain knowledge.
What is meant by Availability?
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).
What is meant by Continuity?
Structural. Disaster recovery capability.
What is meant by Performance?
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.
What is meant by Recoverability?
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.
What is meant by Reliability/Safety?
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?
What is meant by Robustness?
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.
What is meant by Scalability?
Structural. Ability for the system to perform and operate as the number of users or requests increases.
What is meant by Configurability?
Structural. Ability for the end users to easily change aspects of the software’s configuration (through usable interfaces).
What is meant by Extensibility?
Structural. How important it is to plug new pieces of functionality in.
What is meant by Installability?
Structural. Ease of system installation on all necessary platforms.
What is meant by Leverageability/reuse?
Structural. Ability to leverage common components across multiple products.
What is meant by Localization?
Structural. Support for multiple languages on entry/query screens in data fields; on reports, multibyte character requirements and units of measure or currencies.
What is meant by Maintainability?
Structural. How easy it is to apply changes and enhance the system?
What is meant by Portability?
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?
What is meant by Supportability?
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?
What is meant by Upgradeability?
Structural. Ability to easily/quickly upgrade from a previous version of this application/solution to a newer version on servers and clients.
What is meant by Accessibility?
Cross-Cutting. Access to all your users, including those with disabilities like colorblindness or hearing loss.
What is meant by Archivability?
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.)
What is meant by Authentication?
Cross-Cutting. Security requirements to ensure users are who they say they are.
What is meant by Authorization?
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.).
What is meant by Legal?
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?
What is meant by Privacy?
Cross-Cutting. Ability to hide transactions from internal company employees (encrypted transactions so even DBAs and network architects cannot see them).
