The Boundary between Requirements Analysis and Architecture Definition

The note is about boundary between requirements analysts' and architects' job.

An architect usually doesn't gather requirements. Ideally he will be presented with a complete, considered, prioritised list of the requirements for the system.

Architect's role related with requirements includes: - working with the requirements analysts to understand the system’s requirements and their relative importance - for each important requirement, consider the likely difficulty of implementing it and feed this back to the requirements analysts to help them understand what can and cannot be achieved - identifying requirements conflicts and explaining to analysts possible tradeoffs

References

1. Software System Architecture Nick Rozanski, Edin Woods (software-systems-architecture-rozanski-woods), p. 58