Book chapter: The Risk-Driven Model of Software Architecture
As they build successful software, software developers are choosing from alternate designs, discarding those that are doomed to fail, and preferring options with low risk of failure. When the risks are low it is easy to plow ahead without much thought, but, invariably, challenging design problems emerge and developers must grapple with high-risk designs, ones they are not sure will work.
To address failure risks, the earliest software developers invented design techniques that helped them build successful software, such as domain modeling, security analyses, and encapsulation. Today, developers can choose from a huge number of design techniques. From this abundance, a hard question arises: Which design and architecture techniques should developers use?
If there were no deadlines then the answer would be easy: use all the techniques. But that is impractical because a hallmark of engineering is the efficient use of resources, including time. One of the risks developers face is that they waste too much time designing. So a related question arises: How much design and architecture should developers do?
