illities and illiances: Quality Attributes from Security to Resiliency

Quality attributes or cross-cutting technical concerns represent a key area for architectural focus and constraints. From security which is a massively important enterprise issue to resiliency and flexibility, IT architects are faced with quality attribute trade offs on a daily basis. For example, optimizing an application or set of applications for performance will often result in detrimental effects on flexibility. These tradeoffs are an important part of the architects job and if overlooked can cause tremendous downstream impacts to the value IT can generate.