Provide the natural transition from analysis activities to design activities, identifying:
appropriate design elements from analysis
elements
appropriate design mechanisms from related
analysis mechanisms
Maintain the consistency and integrity of the
architecture,
ensuring that:
new design elements identified for the
current iteration are integrated with pre-existing design elements.
maximal re-use of available components and
design elements is achieved as early as possible in the design effort.
How to Staff
These activities are best carried out by a small teamstaffed by cross-functional
team members. Issues that are typically architecturally significant
include performance, scaling, process and thread synchronization, and
distribution. The team should also include members with domain experience
who can identify key abstractions. The team should also have experience
with model organization and layering. The team will need to be able to
pull all these disparate threads into a cohesive, coherent (albeit
preliminary) architecture.
Because the focus of the architecture effort is
shifting toward implementation issues, greater attention needs to be paid
to specific technology issues. This will force the architecture team to
shift members or expand to include people with distribution and deployment
expertise (if those issues are architecturally significant). In order to
understand the potential impact of the structure on the implementation
model on the ease of integration, expertise in the software build
management process is useful to have.
At the same time, it is essential that the architecture team not be composed
of a large extended team. A strategy for countering this trend is to retain a
relatively small core team with a satellite group of extended team members that
are brought in as "consultants" on key issues. This
structure also works well for smaller projects where specific expertise
may be borrowed or contracted from other organizations; they can be
brought in as specific issues need to be addressed.
Work Guidelines
The work is best done in several sessions, perhaps
performed over a few days (or weeks and months for very large systems).
The initial focus will be on the activities Identify Design Mechanisms and
Identify Design Elements, with a great deal of iteration with the
Incorporate Existing Design Elements activity to make sure that new
elements do not duplicate functionality of existing elements.
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