SAIP (Chapter 4): Understanding Quality Attributes

Summary of Chapter 4 of SAIP
This chapter discusses the other essentials of software architecture outside of the functional requirements. It discusses the non-functional requirements (quality attributes) that the architect needs to consider in fulfilling the software requirements. These quality attributes are achieved through the various phases of the project, but often begins by getting a good architecture in place. This chapter provides some key strategies to communicating quality attributes through the architecture.

The book lists 6 parts to developing general quality attribute scenarios to represent the software requirements and then shows how these parts are represented in qualities such as availability, modifiability, security etc. For these general requirements to be made useful however the general quality attribute scenarios need to be made more specific (concrete) to the application under discussion to serve both documentation and requirements for future phases, and in some cases make the requirements testable.