At Microsoft, we use the term “frame” or “framing a problem” in the context of project management. You might hear somebody ask, “what’s the frame?” or “how have you framed the problem?” A Frame is simply a way to partition a problem. The heart of a frame is coming up with a context to understand the dimensions that matter and figure out how to prioritize and scope. One way teams often frame a space is by building a catalog of user stories and then organizing them into themes.

One of my earlier projects on the patterns & practices team at Microsoft was originally called Life-Cycle Practices.  Later, I renamed it to Life-Cycle Templates.  Finally, I settled on Engineering Practices.   Engineering Practices became a key organizing theme for our work and served as the foundation for our ALM frame.
Knowledge AreasThe Engineering Practices Frame uses the following categories to organize software development knowledge.

Management
Requirements and Analysis
Architecture and Design
Development
Testing
Deployment
Maintenance
Security Engineering
Performance Engineering

Notice that the top buckets map to disciplines while the bottom buckets (Security Engineering and Performance Engineering) map to quality attributes.  …

I found an organizing frame for quality attributes (security, performance, … etc.) on SoftwareArchitectures.com and I think it’s helpful.  They organize quality attributes by the following:

Runtime system qualities
Non-runtime system qualities
Business qualities
Architecture qualities
Domain specific qualities.

Quality Attribute Frame
This table shows an example of some quality attributes organized by the Quality Attribute Frame

My Related Posts

Quality Attribute List

While working on Improving Web Application Security: Threats and Countermeasures, my team created the software security frame.  We used the Security Frame to organize and prioritize software security issues.  We used this frame throughout the guide to organize our guidelines and checklists.  We also used the Security Frame to build evaluation criteria to help find key security decisions that can have a large impact.
Categories
We found that we could organize the majority of our security principles, patterns and practices using the following buckets:

Category
Key Considerations

Auditing and Logging
Who did what and when? Auditing …

Photo by mrkumm
While working on Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability (Patterns & Practices), my team created the software performance frame.  We used the performance frame to organize and prioritize software performance and scalability issues.  We used this frame throughout the guide to organize our guidelines and checklists.  We also used the performance frame to build evaluation criteria to help find key performance decisions that can have a large impact.
Categories
We found that we could organize the majority of our performance principles, patterns and practices using …