In this chapter, we learned about software architecture. We saw the different aspects of software architecture, and learned that every architecture comprises a system, which has a structure working in an environment for its stakeholders. We briefly looked at how software architecture differs from software design.

We went on to look at various characteristics of software architecture such as how a software architecture defines a structure, picks a core set of elements, and connects stakeholders.

We then addressed the important question of the importance of software architecture to an organization, and why it is a good idea to have a formal software architecture defined for your software systems.

The distinction of different roles of architects in an organization was discussed next. We saw the various roles system architects play in an organization, and how an Enterprise architect's focus is different from that of the System architect's. The focus of strategy and technology breadth versus technology depth was clarified with illustrations.

We then discussed the elements of the main theme of this book—Architectural Quality Attributes. We defined what a quality attribute is, and then looked, in quite some detail, at the quality attributes of Modifiability, Testability, Scalability/Performance, Security, and Deployability. While going into the details of these attributes, we discussed their definitions, techniques, and how they relate to each other.

With this chapter serving as the base, we are now ready to take on these quality attributes, and then discuss in detail the various tactics and techniques to achieve them using the Python programming language. That forms the rest of this book.

In the next chapter, we'll start with one of the very first quality attributes we discussed in this chapter, namely, Modifiability and its associated attribute, Readability.