1. Introduction and Goals

Describes the relevant requirements and the driving forces that software architects and development team must consider. These include

underlying business goals, essential features and functional requirements for the system,
quality goals for the architecture,
relevant stakeholders and their expectations

1.1 Requirements Overview

Short description of the functional requirements, driving forces, extract (or abstract) of requirements. Links to the (hopefully existing) requirements documents, with information where to find it.

Motivation

From the point of view of the end users a system is created or modified to improve support of a business activity and/or improve the quality.

Form

Short textual description, probably in tabular use-case format. If requirements documents exist this overview should refer to these documents.

Keep these excerpts as short as possible. Balance readability of this document with potential redundancy w.r.t. requirements documents.

Examples

<insert requirements overview>

1.2 Quality goals

Content

The top three (max five) quality goals for the architecture whose fulfillment is of highest importance to the major stakeholders. We really mean quality goals for the architecture. Don’t confuse them with project goals. They are not necessarily identical.

The ISO 25010 standard provides a nice overview of potential topics of interest:

ISO 25010 categories of quality requirements

Motivation

You should know the quality goals of your most important stakeholders, since they will influence fundamental architectural decisions. Make sure to be very concrete about these qualities, avoid buzzwords. If you as an architect do not know how the quality of your work will be judged …

Form

A table with the most important quality goals and concrete scenarios, ordered by priorities.

See section 10 (Quality Requirements) for a complete overview of quality scenarios.

Examples

< insert table of quality goals here>

1.3 Stakeholder

Content

Explicit overview of stakeholders of the system, i.e. all person, roles or organizations that

should know the architecture
have to be convinced of the architecture
have to work with the architecture or with code
need the documentation of the architecture for their work
have to come up with decisions about the system or its development

Motivation

You should know all parties involved in development of the system or affected by the system. Otherwise, you may get nasty surprises later in the development process. These stakeholders determine the extent and the level of detail of your work and its results.