Top 10 Architecture Characteristics / Non-Functional Requirements with Cheatsheet

Love Sharma
ByteByteGo System Design Alliance
7 min readJun 30, 2022

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Imagine you are buying a car. What essential features do you need in it? A vehicle should deliver a person from point A to point B. But we also check it for Safety, Comfort, Maintainability, Ease of repair, or Better mileage. You may also look for an electric version or a better speed. Why? To limit the surprises which may occur in delivering the primary function, i.e., take a person from Point A to Point B.

Similarly, just like a car, motorcycle, or House, the software has its non-functional requirements called "Architectural Characteristics." Whether a website, a mobile, or a desktop app, it should have a set of quality attributes to meet end-user needs.

Architecture Characteristics / Non-Functional Requirements

Briefly, functional requirements define what a system is supposed to do, like in the case of a car, take a person from A to B, and non-functional requirements stipulate how a system is supposed to be.

Here is the overall cheatsheet of NFR:

These top 10 Architectural Characteristics covers most of the aspect of a large-scale project. You don't need to accommodate all in your project; pick the most essential and knock it out. This article does not provide the…

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Love Sharma
ByteByteGo System Design Alliance

Love is an experience cloud engineer with a demonstrated history of building large scale enterprise application.