once the architecture has been agreed upon, it becomes very costly—for managerial and business reasons—to significantly modify it. This is one argument (among many) for analyzing the software architecture for a large system before settling on a specific choice.
The fidelity of the system increases as extensions are added, or early versions are replaced by more complete versions of these parts of the software. In some cases, the parts may be low-fidelity versions or prototypes of the final functionality; in other cases, they may be surrogates that consume and produce data at the appropriate rates but do li... See more
Architecture represents a common abstraction of a system that most, if not all, of the system’s stakeholders can use as a basis for creating mutual understanding, negotiating, forming consensus, and communicating with each other. The architecture—or at least parts of it—are sufficiently abstract that most nontechnical people can understand it to th... See more
The benefits of incremental development include a reduction of the potential risk in the project. If the architecture is for a family of related systems, the infrastructure can be reused across the family, lowering the per-system cost of each.
A system’s ability to meet its desired (or required) quality attributes is substantially determined by its architecture. If you remember nothing else from this book, remember that.