This story is about engagement of a Solution Architect into absolutely new and complex business domain – life science, where a client wants to modernize his legacy platform, which itself is a unique technological offering on the market. Sounds challenging already? Let’s have a look on how a Solution Architect can be successful in such project.

1. Discovery on
Terra Incognita
22 Nov 2019
• 1

2. • 15 years in IT
• Solution Architect at EPAM
• Java CC dedicated member and consultant in Java
technologies
YEVGEN MOSPAN
Solution Architect

3. Content
1. Solution Architects? Who are they?
2. Customer overview
3. Discovery phase
4. Build phase
5. Product rollout phase
6. Summary
33

4. Who is Solution Architect?
Accountable for practice of designing, describing, and managing
the solution engineering in relation to specific business problems

5. • Another CRUD?
• Create animal model to simulate disease by
changing DNA
• Produce instances of animal models
• Find treatment
• Do it efficiently
Customer. Personal medicines for serious diseases

6. DISCOVERY PHASE

7. Areas of discovery
Product/Program
management
Business
Analysis
Development
Architecture
Business &
Tech
Consulting
Experience
Design and
Innovation
Account
Management

8. Architect Accountabilities during Discovery Phase
8
Accountability Area Responsible Accountable Consulted Informed
Compliance with the company strategy/business goals
Collecting architecture significant requirements
Communication of design decisions to stakeholders
Documenting high level design
Defining PoC and results verification
Efforts estimating
Creation of delivery plan
Review functional requirements
Accountable for technical design of the solution for specific business problem

9. Discovery phase activity streams
• Create Experience Map aligned to
BPFs
• Create Experience Brief
• Iterate through clickable prototype
• Engage end-users and create
excitement within the
organization
• Create Business Process Flows
(BPFs)
• Document new taxonomy for
Features and Epics
• Provide input on all aspects related
to design and architecture
• Document necessary user stories
for first 2 sprints
• Create a reusable framework for
CI/CD
• Create an architecture for
Microservices
• Conduct technical evaluations of
available tech + applications
Experience
Design
Business
Analysis
Architectur
e &
Developme
nt
Innovation
• Create Voice and Touch
Entry POC
• Validate technologies which
would work best (hardware
and software)

10. Discovery phase activity streams. Main challenge
• Create a common understanding
of the problems across all teams
• Collaborate as a across teams on
Micro-services and Mobile
technologies
• Align teams on expectations from
client
• Inform and update leadership team
and ensure trust and expertise is
built
Experience
Design
Business
Analysis
Architectur
e &
Developme
nt
Innovation

11. Solution architecture review process
Mar 29 2018
Workshop
Apr 26 2018
Draft
May 31
Deliverables
Jun 28 2018
Voice
11
Vision and key architecture
principles for overall solution
• Knowledge transfer
• Draft: technologies and
frameworks
• Architecture design
• Data model
• CICD and PoC
• Architecture design
• Data model
• Proved technology list
• Innovation
• Architecture

12. Innovation roadmap
12
Voice Data Entry Augmented Reality IoT, Smart Cages
2019 2020 Future

13. Key Results
• High level design in 4 months
• Monthly review with customer successfully
passed
• PoC helped to define technology stack
• Alignment with other streams
13

14. BUILD PHASE
14

15. Architect Accountabilities during Build Phase
Accountability Area Responsible Accountable Consulted Informed
Compliance with the company strategy/business goals
Architecture governance of key architecture decisions to high level architecture
Making sure low level design is compliant high level architecture
Creating and maintenance of technical documentation
Assurance of meeting non-functional requirements of the project
Communication to the client and approvals of the changes in technology stack for project
Explain and demonstrate technical aspects and details to client
Interview key people in development stream
Review user experience requirements to make sure that architecture meets them
Review business requirements to make sure that architecture meets them
Delivery status reports
Accountable for technical leadership and engineering culture

16. Delivery manager Accountabilities
16
Accountability Area Responsible Accountable Consulted Informed
Scope definition and control
Keeping delivery within pre-defined schedule
Delivering product with high quality
Defining and adhering to delivery process
Establishing development process in the team and ensuring it is being followed
Keeping project on budget
Project Resource Management
Defining and adhering to product definition process that conforms to the overall delivery process
Accountable for achieving SOW deliverables according to schedule

17. Jul 2018 Aug 2018 Sep 2018 Oct 2018 Nov 2018 Dec 2018 Jan 2019 Feb 2019 Mar 2019 Apr 2019 May 2019 Jun 2019
First
demo
Platform
deployment
Build phase. First steps
 The customer has seen business value from Sprint 1
 The team has got a stable CICD platform to continue delivering
Discovery 

18. Jul 2018 Aug 2018 Sep 2018 Oct 2018 Nov 2018 Dec 2018 Jan 2019 Feb 2019 Mar 2019 Apr 2019 May 2019 Jun 2019
R1.0 Production release
R1.2 Production release
R2.0
“UAT” 1
Build phase. Releases
 First production release in 7 months
 No technical blocker for regular production updates
First
demo
Platform
deployment

19. Jul 2018 Aug 2018 Sep 2018 Oct 2018 Nov 2018 Dec 2018 Jan 2019 Feb 2019 Mar 2019 Apr 2019 May 2019 Jun 2019
R1.0 Production release
NFR testing: security, performance, reliability, scalability
R1.2 Production release
R2.0
“UAT” 1
Functional automated testing
Centralized logging based EFK
Monitoring based on New Relic, Hawkular CloudWatch
Centralized logging based Splunk
Centralized services and automated testing
First
demo
Platform
deployment

20. Architect and technology. DevOps
Platform Logging and monitoring CICD

21. Architect and technology. Development
Backend Frontend Mobile

22. Architect and technology. Quality assurance
Functional Performance Security

23. Key results of build phase
• System satisfies non-functional requirements and has good
quality
• Minor changes to composition of functional microservices
• Minor changes in tech stack
• Reusable components: filtering framework, user service,
notification service, web components
• Everything as a code. Even diagrams

24. What can be done better
• Not effective cross domain data queries solution
• Data integration approach was revised
• To start NFR testing even earlier

25. PRODUCT ROLLOUT PHASE

26. Architect Accountabilities during Production rollout
Accountability Area Responsible Accountable Consulted Informed
Compliance with the company strategy/business goals
Architecture implementation sign-off and knowledge transfer to support team
Final check of centralized services for monitoring and logging
Final performance, relatability, scalability, security testing
Developing production rollout plan
Accountable for verifying implementation of technical design

27. SUMMARY

28. Summary
• Architect has clear set of accountabilities and responsibilities
• It is not coding 
• Architect never works in isolation
• Do not become ivory tower architect
• Architect is most experienced technical person on the project
• But this doesn’t mean that he knows every technology better than others
• Main architect' peers are: delivery manager, product owner, account manager
• Sync is crucial for this group
• Architect is a leader and mentor
• He MUST engage others into technical process and guide engineering culture

29. Thank you!
Questions?