QUALITY ATTRIBUTES DESCRIBE a

system’s usability, maintainability, per-formance, and reliability (though not its functionality). They can drive cus-tomer satisfaction and differentiate one product from another. Quality attributes are systemwide, so architecture has a huge impact on them. Paul Clements and his colleagues stated, “Modifi ability, performance, security, availability, reliability—all of these are precast once the architecture is laid down. No amount of tuning or clever implementation tricks will wring any of these qualities out of a poorly ar-chitected system.”1 Unfortunately, this also means these qualities can’t be fully verifi ed until the system is basically complete and ready for system-level verifi cation. Nevertheless, it’s impor-tant to identify relevant quality issues prior to system testing. Architecture reviews are a possi-ble solution: they fi nd potential prob-lems,2–4 particularly those related to quality attributes. However, despite their demonstrated benefi ts, many projects are unable or unwilling to use them. These projects tend to be charac-terized by • short schedules, possibly including repeated development episodes with very short cycles; • tight deadlines, leaving little or no time for activities other than production; • neglected documentation, espe-cially internal documentation such as architecture documents; • frequently changing technological or user requirements; and • small teams. These characteristics can lead to a fo-cus on producing merely “working” software or “getting the product out the door”—other activities are lower priority. For lack of a better term, we describe these projects as production-focused. Many such projects (though not all) follow practices found in ag-ile and lean software development methodologies.5–7 We’ve developed a lightweight ar-chitecture review process suitable for production-focused projects. It identi-fi es architecture patterns and exam-ines their effects on quality attributes. We used it to review nine projects; it not only uncovered important architec-tural issues but also improved the de-velopment team’s understanding of the architecture