GoingToMeet

Today, a system's software architecture cannot be seen simply as a means to an end, the end being the implemented system. Although the ultimate measure of the quality of the software architecture lies in the implemented system, in how well it satisfies the requirements and constraints of the project and whether it can be maintained and evolved successfully, the quality of a system's software architecture is one of the critical factors in its overall system quality - encompassing both functional and extrafunctional properties. In order to treat design as an engineering discipline rather than an art, we need the ability to address the quality of the software architecture directly, not simply as it is reflected in the implemented system.

This is a specific goal of QoSA - to deal with software architecture in general and simultaneously focus on its quality characteristics by addressing the problems of:

*designing software architectures of good quality,
*defining, measuring, evaluating architecture quality, and
*managing architecture quality, tying it upstream to requirements and downstream to implementation, and preserving architecture quality throughout the lifetime of the system.

Cross-cutting these problems is the question of the nature of software architecture. Software architecture organizes a system, partitioning it into elements and defining relationships among the elements. For this we often use multiple views, each with a different organizing principle.