Architecture Essays
This story elaborates on one of the critical steps of the Agile EA method I laid out in the story below.
It focuses on Step 3 — Map Hot Spots to IT Area Reference Architectures.
It involves two types of preparation, guidelines and gap analysis.
A. Prepare With the Client and Stakeholders
- Get the relevant industry CBM (Component Business Model)
- Identify component hot spots with the customer for capability, quality, cost, and difficulty of change (e.g., customer self-service capacity)
- Identify the use cases affected by the hot spots and quantify the problem (e.g., customer self-service order history query capacity — average response time 11 s, expected <5 s)
- Decide with your customer which Use Case hot spots will be removed in this round
- Engage the stakeholder actors (including users, business managers, operations staff, developers, business analysts and project managers) to detail the hotspot use cases and provide the system, component and infrastructure information.
B. Prepare Architecturally
1. Read up on abstracted artefacts of functional IT systems from this story
This will help you check the architecture soundness in the gap analysis technique’s step 2 below.
2. Read up on the main architecture decision types from this story
This will help you check the architecture soundness in the gap analysis technique’s step 2 below.
3. Learn or refresh yourself on architecture diagrams and their levels from this story
This will help you check for cohesion, loose coupling and reuse in the gap analysis technique’s step 2 below.
4. Get Level 2 and 3 reference architecture diagrams
This will help you check for cohesion, loose coupling and reuse in the gap analysis technique’s step 2 below.
C. Guidelines
- If it takes more than ten working days to see the big picture and start at least one or two solution projects, you are doing it wrong.
- There is no ideal architecture or technique. There’s no need to prove an obvious finding logically and mathematically. Just put it down and move ahead.
- Iterate, iterate, iterate. Three times. Then stop as the incremental value will not pay for itself.
- Explain your thinking and conclusions without defensiveness to an experienced EA or someone you respect architecturally. There will be improvements from explaining. Make them. This is the time for it, not after projects are launched. Don’t skip this step!
D. Execute the Gap Analysis
1. Capture hotspot use case details
For each hotspot Use Case, capture the following information in a ‘Hotspot details and analysis worksheet’.
- Use Case Name, Business Domain, Sub-domain, Actors, systems traversed
- Problem type (missing function, missing data, poor capacity, performance, availability, scalability, security, running cost, change cost, or change speed)
- Problem details
2. Follow the Gap Analysis process
For each hotspot Use Case problem, follow the analysis workflow below to find the root cause(s).
(The author created all images in SketchWow)
The original pdf can be downloaded from here -> Flowchart. Feel free to use it with attribution.
3. Capture the outcomes
Capture the outcomes of the workflow in the ‘Hotspot details and analysis worksheet’.
Here is a screen grab of the spreadsheet with a sample row populated. The file can be downloaded from here -> IT Systems Gap Analysis Spreadsheet.
4. Draw ‘before’ and ‘after’ architecture diagrams at Levels 2 and 3
If there is a change in the application, integration, information or technology architecture, draw ‘before’ and ‘after’ diagrams at Levels 2 and 3.
5. Look for patterns and define projects
Look for commonalities in the solutions across hot spot use cases and combine related ones into solution projects.
End Note
Finding the gaps and how to fill them is followed by the Agile EA Method Step 4, which creates the solution roadmaps, and Step 5, which executes and governs the rectification programs and projects.
Here is the link again.
Enjoy, architect, and deliver success for your client.
