Usability as a Dominant Quality Attribute

TL;DR

This paper discusses the importance of usability as a key quality attribute in software architecture, reviewing strategies to incorporate usability considerations effectively during design.

Contribution

It elaborates on strategies for integrating usability into software architecture and compares their advantages and disadvantages.

Findings

Usability is often overlooked in architectural design.

Different strategies for usability have varying benefits and drawbacks.

Incorporating usability can improve software quality and user satisfaction.

Abstract

Whenever an architect or a team of architects begins an architectural design, there are certain goals set to achieve. There are many factors involved in setting up goals for the architecture design such as type of the project, end user perspective, functional and non-functional requirements and so on. This paper reviews and further elaborates strategy for the usability characteristics of software architecture. Although user centered designs are tremendously gaining popularity, still in many design scenarios, usability is barely even considered as one of the primary goals. This work provides an opportunity to compare different strategies and evaluate their pros and cons.