Summary
After reading this chapter, you should have grasped the essentials of ATAM and its main purpose: discovering sensitivity points, trade-off points, risks, and impactful quality attributes to help you make informed decisions. I strongly encourage you to have a pragmatic (not dogmatic) approach to ATAM because not every asset requires the same level of attention. However, in mission-critical projects, ATAM proves to be efficient and can be credited with raising the right questions at the right time. Flaws resulting from incorrect architectural decisions are very hard to fix and adjust at a later stage. Note that I refer to flaws, not to maturity levels. You can work in an incremental way but you should make sure not to end up with true design flaws in your architecture. ATAM should safeguard you against such adverse situations. In our next chapter, we will review the different architectural styles, from decades ago up to today.
