Attribute Driven Design

One of our mentors in the studio project, Felix, is an expert in Attribute Driven Design. He suggested us to use this technique, and we found it useful for the initial point.

The SEI's view of software architecture is, every architecture can do any function requirement, so you need those quality attributes to find the right design. The quality attributes are traditionally called non-functional requirements, but SEI people hate that name. First, we have to define some scenarios for each quality attribute the stakeholders care. For example, we may want the system to be "high performance" in the sense it can handle 1000 requests per second. This simple scenario becomes a limiting factor you need to consider when you design the architecture, and SEI provides some very general techniques or architecture patterns for high performance designs.

The idea is to pick several most important quality attribute scenarios, make up a design to fulfill for each of them, and then try to combine them together. After this process, you have your first-cut of the architecture. The next step is to further enrich it so it supports other minor quality attributes as well.