Agile Architecture Fundamentals

Is agile architecture the next step in your professional life, making you wonder what the architect role is and what it takes? Or do you already feel you need to add more structure to your current work as an architect?
Agile Architecture Fundamentals course will:

Deepen your understanding of how to work as an architect, and of the fundamentals in architecture work
Explain what an architect’s role is and what skills it takes
Teach you how to produce architecture from requirements, and to build a Solution-architecture design from the ground up
Stay technology-neutral, avoiding solutions tied to a particular programming language or environment. 

Day 1
Introduction

What is architecture, and why do we need it?

Basic process of architecture

What an architect needs to know
Prerequisites
Agile: architecture, architecture process, architecture documents and models
Key principles of an agile architect
Modeling and JBGE (“lagom bra” in Swedish)

Enterprise, Solution/Software, System Architect

What is an Architect and what do they do?

EA in a nutshell

Align to long-term goals and enterprise strategy
An enterprise architect’s templates and frameworks: TOGAF, Zachmann

SWA

High-level functional requirements, quality attributes, ranking quality attributes in an architecture proposal
Advise decisions on buy-rent-build, and on component sourcing
Use Case/User Story map, layered components with interfaces, sequence diagrams, first-cut Solution Architecture document
Lay the table for the devs, advise lead dev and configuration manager on development environment, continuous-build setup, dev guidelines, testing, and other practical points

System architect

Deployment, HW/MW environment
Tools and procedures - for operations, housekeeping & system administration and maintenance, support, physical setup, load balancing, caching.

Day 2 – A first-cut Solution architecture
Step 1 - Architecturally significant requirements

Start with high level functional requirements

Find quality attributes - Quality Attribute Workshop, and/or interview stakeholders
Rank quality attributes
Exercise - HFR, derive quality requirements to get stakeholder feedback

Step 2 - Solution Architecture

From step 1, how should system be designed
Architecture patterns versus tactics
Information and integration, relational (ACID) versus noSQL (BASE), the CAP tradeoff, normalization and O-R mapping decisions (Make 1 to 1, Roll up, Roll down)
SOLID
Variability mechanisms, per binding time

Exercises: Use Case/User Story map, component-and-layer diagram with interfaces, sequence diagram and scenarios

Step 3 - System Architecture

Deployment structure, dev guidelines and basic how-to's & tooling
High-level class diagram within components/subcomponents
Exercise: deployment diagram (time permitting)

Step 4 - Implementation
Step 5 – Deployment
Architecture from a knowledge perspective

Individual: learning, in and for professional life
Enterprise-wide: knowledge management to balance know-how, IT tools, and funding