Brief Q&As About Solution Architecture

1. What would be the key artefacts that need to be delivered when defining a solution architecture?

Key artefacts present different views on solution design where each view is targeting specific user groups. For example:

1. Business architecture artefacts address business users, planners and business stakeholders.
2. Data architecture artefacts address database and system administrators.
3. Application architecture artefacts provide guidelines and instructions for software development and test teams.
4. Technology architecture artefacts are essential for infrastructure administrators, development team and system managers.
5. Security architecture artefacts address the development and test teams, system administrators, security auditors, business users and managers.

Solution architecture artefacts also depend on methodology used by an organisation that the solution is designed for. Popular methodologies include but not limited to TOGAF, Zachman, RUP, CMMI, FEAF.  Examples of key artefacts could be:

1. TOGAF:
1. Catalogues (role catalogue, product catalogue, data entity catalogue, etc)
2. Matrices (business interaction matrix, actor/role matrix, system data matrix, etc)
3. Core and extension diagrams (functional decomposition diagram, use case diagram, process flow diagram, event diagram, product lifecycle diagram, data security diagram, etc)
2.  Zachman:
1. Practically sufficient subset of Lists, Models, Diagrams, Specifications and Details documents that are based on 30 views of Zachman framework matrix – Why/How/What/Who/Where/When by Contextual/Conceptual/Logical/Physical/Detailed.

Sometimes a final Architecture Document could combine major views and present the solution to most user groups. From my experience I found that in some cases that require relatively urgent delivery, a properly built Business Requirements Document could become a part of the final Architecture Document. I published a short manual for such BRD on my blog at http://bananaqualitytester.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/guidelines-for-business-requirements.html.

2. What would be the role of Solution Architect during the project lifecycle?

Solution Architect’s activity during the project lifecycle should be organically coupled with business stakeholders’ decision making, development team/s delivery progress and the end users expectations to ensure:

• Target architecture would accommodate any possible evolution of the business stakeholders’ vision of the future system.
• Development teams would follow the architectural guidelines without sacrificing quality, robustness and effectiveness of the future system.
• The end users have an early access to the system-in-development, play with it, test it and provide feedback to architecture and development teams.

It always a good idea to keep architecture artefacts such as definitions, models, diagrams, specifications, etc updated during the project to make sure they could be re-used in the future by the business users, help desk and system support staff.

3. How would a Solution Architecture work in the context of Waterfall and Agile methodologies?

Once all business requirements are clarified and understood, a typical search for a solution may include such activities as reviewing competitive technologies, evaluating open and commercial off-the-shelf products, building and testing prototypes, etc. In some organisations it’s called Research and Development (R&D) stage. The output of R&D stage is a solution design that is (or at least very close to) target architecture that would be eventually defined in such documents as Architecture Document mentioned above.

Waterfall methodology is acceptable in cases when business decision about future system is final and a chance for any changes is very low. In this case R&D stage is paramount for the whole project as the solution architecture artefacts would be translated into project management timelines, delivery milestones, QA test case scenarios and system releases. Given the importance of R&D, it would make sense to spend more time on avoiding any ambiguity during reviewing business, functional and non-functional requirements, looking for possible issues with off-the-shelf products and stress-testing prototypes to ensure a delivery of a flawless solution.

Agile methodology doesn’t require absolutely complete set of requirements, giving it a chance to evolve during the system development. From high-level perspective, an agile project could be represented as follows:

The straight lines coming from the centre (epicentre) are individual use cases, circle lines are delivery milestones and the red spiral line is actual system development that ‘covers’ use cases (and milestones) more and more with each iteration until all of them are done (or delivered). In this case the core system functionality (area around the epi-centre) is paramount and requires clear prioritisation by the solution architect. Because of project agile nature, it is expected that solution architecture artefacts would evolve during the project and therefore should be continuously updated by the architect and those changes propagated through all teams involved into the product delivery.

4. What process steps would be expected between the capture of requirements and start of the coding?

These steps may depend on architecture methodology used in the organisation (TOGAF, RUP, Zachman, etc) as well as the type of given project (waterfall or agile). They may include:

• Business, functional and non-functional requirements review and clarification.
• Business requirements update (see Guideline for Business Requirements mentioned above) and their verification with business users. These steps would help to build with business users unambiguous project vocabulary, learn more about their expectations, identify key people in their team and establish working relationships with them.
• R&D stage – please, see (3) for more details.
• Initial solution design.
• Verification of acceptability of proposed solution for existing or target infrastructure.
• Cross-check of proposed solution design with budget requirements.
• Validation of proposed solution design against system security constraints.
• Validation of proposed solution design against internal and/or external rules and legislation.
• Approval of solution design with key stakeholders.
• Final (or semi-final in case of agile) solution design.
• Creation of solution architecture artefacts - please, see (1) for more details.
• Definition of development environment. This may include continuous integration and automated testing, knowledge management system, issue tracking system, network topology (in case of delivering a Cloud-based solution), etc – this is a range of approaches that would allow to keep development process transparent to the architecture team as well as to other interested parties involved in the project.
•  Requirements for system test coverage.