architecture-characteristicslisted

# Architecture Characteristics Produce a small, justified set of qualities that shape the design, with their meanings, scope and priorities made explicit. A shortlist guides design attention; it is not a list of the only requirements the system must satisfy. ## Workflow 1. **Establish scope and evidence.** Obtain the business operation/domain, affected users, critical failure/change situations, requirements and stakeholder concerns. Identify decision owners and known constraints. For an existing system, inspect relevant incidents, traffic, deployment/change history and dependency diagrams. For greenfield, label forecasts and assumptions; do not invent baseline measurements. 2. **Elicit candidates before ranking.** Read [eliciting-and-capping.md](references/eliciting-and-capping.md) when creating or revising a list or resolving stakeholder priorities. Link each candidate to an explicit requirement, a stakeholder concern or an inference from domain evidence. Confirm inferred needs with the responsible stakeholder; a plausible inference is not an approved requirement. 3. **Test architectural relevance.** Ask what success condition the quality expresses, why it matters here, and what structural choice or risk it could influence. Keep domain rules and constraints visible even when they are not quality labels. A concern need not require extra components to matter: rejecting an unsafe structure is a structural consequence. Separate desired outc