Discovering and refining quality attributes

Unlike business requirements, it is implausible to expect to receive accurate quality needs and expectations from the business stakeholders. Hence, focused attention led by architects to discover quality requirements is an absolute necessity. The discovery of quality attributes broadly consists of identifying stakeholders, conducting QAWs, and refining QASes. The following sections cover these in detail, starting with capturing the stakeholder matrix.

Aligning stakeholders to quality attributes

The stakeholder matrix is an immensely useful tool for understanding stakeholder needs, performing trade-off analysis, determining the impact of architecture decisions, and mitigating potential risks. It is also incredibly powerful for architects to understand, communicate, and negotiate quality attributes with relevant stakeholders. The stakeholder matrix is generally captured once at the beginning and revisited in every iteration as required...