1

Establish Application Challenge Criteria

• Determine which criteria to use to identify requirements and scenarios that represent significant architectural challenges.
• Consult the existing enterprise architecture documents for criteria. Review any business requirements, technical requirements, and enterprise standards that must be applied to new applications.
• Capture additional criteria that are known to be architecturally significant, such as integration with legacy systems, reusability of code, reusing existing vendor libraries and platforms, and controlling maintenance costs.
• Capture additional criteria that represent risks and cost when implementing a technical solution.

2

Select Candidate Group of Requirements

• Evaluate each quality of service requirement and product requirement against the challenge criteria. If a requirement represents an architectural challenge, consider it a candidate for modeling.
• For example, a requirement that the new product must support older customer databases meets the criteria of integrating with legacy systems. Such a requirement is a candidate for modeling how the integration would work.

3

Select Candidate Group of Scenarios

• Evaluate each scenario against the challenge criteria. If a scenario represents an architectural challenge, consider it a candidate for modeling.
• For example, a scenario in which the user downloads a client update meets the criteria concerning maintenance costs. Such a scenario is a candidate for modeling how best to handle client updates.

4

Reduce Candidate Group

• Review the candidate scenarios and requirements. Remove scenarios and requirements that duplicate the challenge criteria or are better represented by other scenarios and requirements. Trim the candidate group to a core group representing the key architectural challenges, risks, and costs of the new application.
• Keep the scenarios and requirements that best represent the challenge criteria, and that present the most risk, and present the most potential cost when architecting for a technical solution.
• Keep the scenarios and requirements that are the most comprehensive or key parts of the application.

5

Create Application Diagrams

• From the remaining candidate requirements and scenarios, devise several potential architectural solutions by creating application diagrams for each approach.
• In each approach, consider different vendor libraries, technologies, platforms, code reuse and other important architectural considerations.
• Create an application diagram for each approach.
• Check each application diagram into source control.

Application diagrams for each architectural approach are created.