Managing Trade-offs in Adaptable Software Architectures

Foreword by Paris Avgeriou

The software architecture community realized from the very beginning (more than 2 decades ago) that functionality was not the main challenge; we could get that right, sooner or later, in an incremental and iterative manner. The real focus for researchers and the main pain point in industrial architecture practice was and still remains how to tame quality attributes. Form (architecture) does follow function, but form has some trouble following quality.

The problem of achieving requirements for quality attributes qualifies as a “wicked problem,” and it is a multifaceted one. First, one cannot achieve each attribute in isolation as they are often interdependent and even contradictory. Consider, for example, the conflict ...