Architecture Style Selection Framework

Core Idea

The Architecture Style Selection Framework is a systematic six-step process for choosing an architecture style based on characteristics, business drivers, and trade-off analysis rather than trends or personal preferences.

What Is the Architecture Style Selection Framework?

The Architecture Style Selection Framework provides a disciplined approach to choosing an architectural style, forcing explicit analysis of business requirements translated into architectural characteristics rather than following trends or defaulting to familiar patterns.

Six Sequential Steps:

1. Identify architecture characteristics: Both explicit characteristics stated by stakeholders and implicit characteristics inherent to the domain
2. Rank characteristics by priority: Must-haves, important, and nice-to-have
3. Evaluate candidate styles: Assess each candidate’s support for your top characteristics
4. Identify best-fit styles: Typically two or three candidates that excel at your highest-priority characteristics
5. Analyze trade-offs: Examine what you sacrifice in lower-priority characteristics for each candidate
6. Choose the style: Select the style that offers the best overall trade-off profile for your specific priorities

Power of systematic approach:

• Prevents “architecture by committee”: Where decisions emerge from political compromise rather than technical analysis
• Prevents “architecture by resume-building”: Where architects choose styles to pad their CVs rather than serve business needs
• Acknowledges context-dependence: A layered architecture might be perfect for a simple CRUD application but catastrophic for a high-volume real-time trading platform

Why This Matters

Architecture style selection has profound long-term consequences. Once a system is built in a particular style, migrating to a different style requires significant investment. Systematic analysis of business drivers dramatically increases the probability of long-term success and creates a defensible decision when stakeholders question architectural choices.

Related Concepts

• Architecture-Characteristics-Categories
• Architecture-Characteristics-Extraction-Process
• Architecture-Decision-Criteria
• Trade-Offs-and-Least-Worst-Architecture
• Layered-Architecture-Style
• Microservices-Architecture-Style
• Event-Driven-Architecture-Style

Sources

• Richards, Mark and Neal Ford (2020). Fundamentals of Software Architecture: An Engineering Approach. O’Reilly Media. ISBN: 978-1-492-04345-4. Chapter 18: Choosing the Appropriate Architecture Style. Available: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/fundamentals-of-software/9781492043447/

Note

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