Architectural characteristics

What distinguishes software architecture from coding and design? Many things, including the role that architects have in defining architectural characteristics, the important aspects of the system independent of the problem domain. Many organizations describe these features of software with a variety of terms, including nonfunctional requirements, but we dislike that term because it is self-denigrating. Architects created that term to distinguish architecture characteristics from functional requirements, but naming something nonfunctional has a negative impact from a language standpoint: how can teams be convinced to pay enough attention to something “nonfunctional”? Another popular term is quality attributes, which we dislike because it implies after-the-fact quality assessment rather than design. We prefer architecture characteristics because it describes concerns critical to the success of the architecture, and therefore the system as a whole, without discounting its importance.

An architecture characteristic meets three criteria:

• Specifies a nondomain design consideration
• Influences some structural aspect of the design
• Is critical or important to application success

Source: Mark Richards and Neal Ford. Software Architecture 2024 V2 . Kindle Edition.