Software Engineering Institute

Architectural tactics are fundamental design decisions. They are the building blocks for both architectural design and analysis. A catalog of architectural tactics has now been in use for several years in academia and industry. This report illustrates the use of this catalog in industrial applications, describing how tactics can be used in both design and analysis. The report further shows how the needs of practice have caused the catalog of availability tactics to be updated, but demonstrates that the underlying structure of the tactics categorization has remained stable. Finally, a real-world example is provided of the application of the updated set of availability tactics, showing how it illuminates design decisions, as guided by associated heuristics and analytic models.