Software architectures: critical success factors and cost drivers

Some useful perspectives on the potential and the pitfalls of software architecture investments can be gained via analysis of software architecture critical success factors and their associated cost and benefit drivers. Basically, the potential of software architecture investments comes from appropriately identifying and exploiting positive cost-benefit relationships. The pitfalls come from neglecting critical success factors or from making unrealistic assumptions about their associated cost drivers. Examples from practice of both potential and pitfalls are given in the context of a table which summarizes a framework of software architecture critical success factors and cost drivers being developed at USC