Software Architecture Reviews

Review is a powerful technique that contributes to software quality. Various artifacts of the software development lifecycle are subject to review to ensure that any deficiencies could be spotted early on and addressed sooner, before letting it slip through further phases and in turn consuming more efforts than expected down the line. One such important review is the review of the software architecture. If you are asked to review the architecture of a software, it could be due to one of the following reasons.

1. Possibly, you are a Senior Architect and is expected to complement your fellow Architect by reviewing his work and thereby helping him and in turn the organization to get the best possible software Design. Some or most organizations mandate this need as part of their engineering process. When this review is done effectively, the benefits are huge, as this review occurs early in the development life cycle. 
2. One or more of the custom built application(s) used in the organization are suspected to have certain serious reliability / performance issue and you are engaged to come up with an analysis and a plan to set it right. If this situation arise, then it is very much evident that the first one did not happen or it wasn’t done well. In some cases, such situation arise when the stake holders knowingly compromise on certain software quality attributes initially and then surprised to see its impact down the line as it hits back. 
3. You are possibly looking out to license a product and are evaluating its suitability to your organization. In this, case you will probably have a checklist of items created based on the IT policies and framework of your organization and this is highly dependent on the information revealed by the product vendor. 

Though there could be more reasons, the above are some of the primary reasons as to why one would need to perform an architectural review. In spite of as many reviews and testing, issues slips through and challenges the IT architects at some point down the line. Resolution of such issues may call for certain specific reviews and the method and approach would be different based on the type of the problem. For instance, if there be a data breach, a security review of the architecture is what is needed to not only identify the root cause for the current problem, but also to identify potential vulnerabilities and come up with solutions to plug those gaps.

These specific reviews can be typically associated with the broad software quality attributes, which are also termed as non-functional-requirements. The best way to approach these specific reviews is to start with an architectural review. A review checklist would be a good tool to use for the purpose, but the checklist should be exhaustive enough to cover necessary areas, so that the reviewer can get the right and required inputs and would be in a good position to form an opinion about the possible deficiencies and can relate it with the problem being attempted to be resolved.

Keep a watch on my blog for more on specific architecture reviews.