Software Engineering Institute

Before your development team builds the system, your design team needs to clarify the capabilities it needs to deliver. To begin its work, that team needs to understand the business and mission goals of stakeholders in the context of requirements for quality attributes such as availability, security, and interoperability. Such quality attributes influence decisions about software architecture.

The SEI Quality Attribute Workshop (QAW) provides the means to identify important quality attributes, derived from business and mission goals, before there is a software architecture. Clarifying quality attribute concerns early provides architects with more insight into what is important and why, in turn improving their ability to create architectures that better meet organization needs.