A key difference between SARM and many other architecture analysis methods is its incorporation of stakeholder perspectives. It allows the analyst to view the architecture from the perspectives of different stakeholders, seeing strengths and weaknesses of options ‘through their eyes’. There is a price to be paid for this great benefit – the system needs to know which requirements are the ones that each stakeholder is interested in. Only with this information can the risk views be changed to reflect the stakeholders’ perspectives.
Our experience has been that these insights are usually worth ‘paying for’ with the effort to capture that extra information. However, if you don’t need to see the analysis from stakeholder perspectives you can just go ahead with SARM and leave out the definition of stakeholders.