Thoughts Register

Evaluation of an application architecture is an important step in any architecture-definition process. Its level of significance varies from organization to organization, based on a variety of factors (such as application size and business criticality). In some IT organizations, it is a part of a formal process; in others, it is performed only upon special requests that stakeholders might raise. Enterprises sometimes have a dedicated “Architectural Review Board” (or ARB) that is made up of a team of experienced architects who are earmarked for performing periodic architectural evaluations. Scenarios that drive the architecture-evaluation process include: ·When a business must validate an application architecture to see whether it can support new business models. ·An expansion to new geographies and regions—resulting in the need to check whether an existing application architecture can scale to new levels. ·Impaired application performance and user concerns that lead to an assessment, to s…

Listed below are the key factors that are to be considered while starting estimation for an application, as they may have significant impact on cost as well as overall schedule. Level of impact will vary based on the nature of the team that is going to carry out the development. Even though we can think that some of these factors are any way considered for estimation implicitly, they are listed here explicitly to ensure that they are not missed. So when we get a RFP to respond, keeping a ‘special eye’ on these factors will help us in arriving at a reasonable ‘ball-park’ figure.
Even we can allocate a percentage against each of this factor to indicate the level of impact each one has on overall estimation. After the execution of the project, these percentages can be verified with the actual figures and it can be used as benchmarks in subsequent estimation for similar types of application developments. There could be multiple factors that are related to these percentages. Once these fact…