Category Archives: Enterprise Architecture
Tips for Newbies to Create Architecture Diagrams – Part 1
In the initial years of application development, I have found several junior or mid-level developers show up blank faces when asked about architecture of application. This is primarily because that they have been involved mainly in coding or low level design aspect of application development till that point of time in their career. Thus, these developers look up to architects to help them come up with various different architectural viewpoints. Not only this, project managers also look up to architects to come up with architecture and help the team get started. Before I go ahead and write on a series of articles on how newbies could come with the …
Journey from Technical Lead to Technical Architect
What is road to becoming a technical architect is a tricky topic, many wants to know. Especially, this is of interest largely to senior developers and technology leads. Let me give a shot at this. I would love to hear your comments in this regard: Technology vs Thought Leadership: Technical lead is primarily responsible for exploration and implementation of technology (tools & frameworks) to solve a particular set of problem in hand. He also plays a crucial role in doing proof-of-concept in related with adoption of newer technologies. The person on this role also acts as a mentor and guide to individual team members in terms of adoption of technology. However, …
Technical Architect Interview Questions
Today, I happened to take an interview of a 9 years experienced guy in java technologies working as a senior tech lead in one of the global software services companies. Following are some of the questions that were discussed: 1. Define reliability and its different attributes. 2. If customer mentions reliability as one of the most important non functional requirements, what architecture and design strategy would you recommend to the team to achieve a high state of reliability? 3. If given a set of business requirements, what are done of the key steps you would undertake to reach uppity lowest most level of designing classes, interface etc? How would you …
How to Start a Technology Center of Excellence
Before going into the topic, it is very important to understand about what can be called as “(Technology) Center of Excellence” and why do an organization need one? Why an organization need a center of excellence for any technology? Multiple reasons. Following are the key ones: Planning to start a new technology initiative enterprise-wide or in multiple LOB based on enterprise business needs. For example, Center of Excellence for BPM, SOA, EA, Big Data etc. For instance, a large company want to adopt BPM practice. This is where COE is needed. As a software service provider, one might want to start a new team who does R&D on the technology, …
Where do these SOA Transformation projects come from?
If you have been working on one of those SOA transformation projects as an technical architect, some of you might as well have wondered on the very fact as to what is the origin of such projects? Why companies invest on these initiatives? From where do they know that they would require to transform their application landscape into services based on SOA and much more. The answer to the above question lies with enterprise architecture initiatives and various enterprise architects who would have worked on it. Why EA initiatives in the first place? Lets look at some of the following pain-points which may lead to EA initiatives: A large enterprise …
Enterprise Architecture: What is it?
If you have been solution or technical architect, have you ever wondered what would it take for you to become enterprise architect? Have you thought on what is definition of enterprise architect? Simply speaking, an enterprise architect is a person who is responsible for creating and managing enterprise IT architecture in relation with business capabilities of an organization. One of his sole responsibilities is to ensure the business-IT alignment in a consistent and sustained manner thereby maximizing the ROI on business investments on IT. What are some of the key activities/tasks undertaken by an enterprise architect? AS-IS architecture TO-BE architecture Gaps Analysis Migration Road map To successfully perform above activities, …
How to Write a Winner Design Document for Agile User Stories
When the development is based on agile methodology such as SCRUM and especially, distributed SCRUM, at some point, the need for design document becomes key to success of sprint delivery with as lesser technical debt as possible. In that regard, there has been questions around whether to have something such as design document at all. Many of those practicing agile as a developer just hate the idea of writing design documents and relate it with waterfall development model. They give the argument that a) in agile development, design have to change as we develop and b) thus, the design document may go obsolete in no time. To a great extent, I …
Different Kind of Architects
Are you one of them who get confused about what are different kind of architects? If yes, keep reading! Following are different kind of architects: Solution Architect: They are the people who architect business solutions to solve a set of business problems. They need to have in-depth knowledge about business in general. They also need to be very much aware of functioning of different strategic business units (SBU) in order to architect integrated solutions that may cut across different SBUs to solve the particular problem. They deal with business processes while working on the solution and a descriptive business process diagram is one of their key deliverables. They may be …
I found it very helpful. However the differences are not too understandable for me