Summary

Although every system has an architecture, not every system has an AD that effectively communicates the essence of the architecture to all of its stakeholders. A good AD will lay a solid foundation for the remaining system development work, while a poor AD may fail to address key concerns or may be ignored altogether. In this chapter, we described how you can ensure that your AD meets its goals.

An effective AD has six desirable properties: correctness, sufficiency, conciseness, clarity, currency, and precision. These properties can sometimes conflict with one another, so (as always) you have to achieve an effective balance.