Agility and Experimentation: Practical Techniques for Resolving Architectural Tradeoffs

This paper outlines our experiences with making architectural tradeoffs between performance, availability, security, and usability, in light of stringent cost and time-to-market constraints, in an industrial web-conferencing system. We highlight the difficulties in anticipating future architectural requirements and tradeoffs and the value of using agility and experiments as a tool for mitigating architectural risks in situations when up front pen- and-paper analysis is simply impossible.