A Supportability Framework

Stakeholder concerns extend beyond end-user functionality and often go beyond error free operation, fast response times, high throughput, high availability and security. A large set of stakeholder concerns relate to the cost of building, owning and managing an IT-system in terms of quality attributes such as the ease of modifiability, configurability, manageability, usability and maximizing the system's ROI. Consequently, the realization of these quality attributes can be verified by how the system is built rather than what goes into the system. Because of this these quality attributes tend to be ambiguously specified and are hard to verify using conventional QA techniques. This paper presents a Supportability Framework that uncovers and links together concerns of 3 major types of stakeholders and transforms these concerns into a set of features and functionality to be realized in the system to be used by these stakeholders. This is accomplished using supportability scenarios, which use quality attributes as focal points with a specific productivity goal such as optimizing resources, time or money. The degree of realization of each of the quality attributes is described in terms of the conceptual tools of architecture such as use-cases, architecture styles and patterns, platform services and allocation views. The resultant architecture description and features produced by the supportability framework makes it simpler to establish the inherent relationship of the productivity concerns of the organization with respect to the system and their eventual architectural realization as a set of quality attributes.