2023-06-04 Sunday - Benefits of Early Architecture Engagement

[image credit: stevepb on pixabay.com]

 

In early May, I completed an architecture assessment for a start-up.

Why: There was no understanding of the architecture of what was built (no documentation/architecture/design artifacts - just code) - and no understanding of some of the critical issues/risks that existed in what was delivered.

Findings: 48 specific findings/recommendations, to help guide them in their future efforts.

Effort: An abbreviated/compressed ~2 week effort

Earlier Engagement: This would have been ideal - to help them avoid some decisions/outcomes - that will continue to have ramifications for years. 

[Note: They expended a significant amount of their capital to engage with an offshore team to build their MVP. No documentation, just code (no design, no architecture artifacts)]

This would make an *excellent* case study - of how beneficial it can be to have a broadly experienced architect generalist engaged - from the beginning - even with a small startup.

*Some* of the types of artifacts and assistance - that can help even such early stage companies, or even internal (larger company) initiatives:

- Vision, Strategy, Roadmap
- Business Capability Model
- Business Requirements elaboration (Personas, Actors, Scenarios, Use Cases)
- Business Architecture
- Business Process Flows
- Technology Evaluation & Selection
- Technology Reference Model
- Cloud/Infrastructure Architecture Model
- Integration Architecture Model
- Technology Roadmap
- Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs)
- Vendor assessments/evaluations
- agile software development practices
- Solution Architecture
- Engineering mentoring & guidance
- Code Reviews
- Retrospectives
- Technical Risk mitigation
- Security Architecture
- Information Architecture
- System Reliability Engineering
- Operations, Monitoring, Observability
- CI/CD
- Quality Assurance & Testing methodologies
- Principles, Policies, Standards, Specifications
- Legal, Regulatory, Compliance 

2023-04-27 Thursday - Architecture Assessment for a SaaS startup

 

[image credit: MustangJoe on pixabay.com]

As a favor for a friend, I'm spending time over the next two weeks to prepare an Architecture Assessment report (usually 80-240 pages) for a new startup that completed their SaaS platform development last year.

This is where the depth and breadth of my decades of experience - as a CTO, Principal Architect, Enterprise Architect, Business Architect, Cloud Architect, Data Architect, Integration Architect, Solution Architect, Security Consultant, Site Reliability Engineer, DevSecOps, Development Manager, and Software Engineer - all come into play.

I relish these types of tasks - for it exercises all of my "Army of One" skills:

• Business Strategy, Vision, Mission analysis
• Business Architecture (Application Portfolios, Business Capabilities & Business Process analysis)
• NFR Analysis: Availability, Capacity, Configuration Management, Deployment, Documentation, Disaster Recovery, Scalability, Reliability, Performance, Security, ..., ... (some of the 46 key NFRs I examine during any Architecture Assessment)
• Domain Architecture
• Infrastructure & Cloud cost optimizations
• Data Architecture & Database design
• API Strategy & Integration Architecture
• Security Architecture (Authentication, Authorization, Encryption, Supply Chain, ...)
• Software Engineering Best Practices (Clean Code, SOLID principles, ...)
• Risk Mitigation
• Strategic & Tactical Roadmap Planning
• IT recommendations for building/reinforcing Intellectual Property "moats"

After a very preliminary review of the deployment architecture information- I have some hunches on where Cloud hosting costs may be reduced.

Within just the first 20 minutes of beginning my deep dive into the codebase - I have over a dozen preliminary findings/recommendations.

2019-06-15 Saturday - Updating the Architecture Review Checklist

I'm working on a major update to my "Architecture Review Checklist" tool (via an Excel spreadsheet).

This will give you an idea of the expanded scope it is intended to cover.

And, you'll note the new section ("99.3 Summary Report") - which will provide a summarized count of the Gap Analysis columns, for the collection of assessed requirements - in each of the sections (3.0 -20.0, currently)