Summary

Functional requirements that describe system behavior must be completed with non-functional requirements that constrain system performance, scalability, availability, resilience, interoperability, usability, and security.

Performance requirements come from response time and system load requirements. As a software architect, you should ensure you have the required performance at the minimum cost, building efficient algorithms and taking full advantage of the available hardware resources with multithreading.

Scalability is the ability of a system to be adapted to an increasing load. Systems can be scaled vertically by providing more powerful hardware, or horizontally by replicating and load balancing the same hardware, which increases the availability. The cloud, in general, and Azure can help us implement strategies dynamically, with no need to stop your application.

Tools such as .NET Core that run on several platforms can ensure interoperability, that is, the capability of your software to run on different target machines and with different operating systems (Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, and so on).

Usability is ensured by taking care of the input field's order, the effectiveness of the item selection logic, and how easy your system is to learn.

Besides, the more complex your solution is, the better resilience it should have. The idea of resilience is not to guarantee that the solution does not fail. Instead, the idea is to guarantee that the solution has an action defined when each part of the software fails.

As a software architect, you must consider security from the very beginning of the design. Following the guidelines to determine the correct patterns and having a security specialist in your team would be a great option to achieve all the current regulations we have.

In the next chapter, you will learn how Azure DevOps tools can help us when it comes to collecting, defining, and documenting our requirements.