Architecture Consulting

What we do?

Our architecture consulting engagements are short, dedicated, effective and very intense. While designing a building can be done in weeks, constructing it may take a couple of years. The same is true with software design: our engagements are relatively short, as little as two to five dedicated, effective days, where we analyze the requirements and produce the design.

We review the product requirements and architecture, provide feedback or a new design, and work with the lead developer or architect on a vertical slice implementation of the architecture. The goal is to produce some 40-60 design diagrams depicting the various design aspects of the system. Developers can then simply use these diagrams as the system’s blueprint and continue to construct the system.

What do you get in 2 days consulting?

In a 2 days consulting engagement, we spend about half a day understanding the product and the requirements and half a day on the current architecture.
In the second day we either provide feedback on the current design (if it is adequate), or propose an alternative design. We produce design diagrams depicting definition of services and logical tiers, allocation to assemblies, run-time processes, identity management, security authentication and authorization, transaction management, thread synchronization and code-access security policies.

What do you get in 5 days consulting?

In a longer engagement (5 days), we spend the third and fourth day implementing a vertical slice of the architecture. A vertical slice is a stubbed-out implementation of one or two services in each architecture segment or layer. A vertical slice is the best way to validate the architecture and to ensure the customer understands it and can take it from there. The vertical slice represents most if not all of the ‘plumbing’ issues that are the Achilles’ heel of most applications, where developers spend the bulk of the effort, both in initial development time and in long-term maintenance.
The fifth day is spent testing and even stress-testing the vertical slice. Having the design done and prototyped in a few days is a huge productivity and quality boost, as well as overall up front risk reduction. We use ATAM for architecture quality assessment. Performance engineering is done using benchmarking, tuning techniques and capacity planning to ensure that the architecture chosen is guaranteed to perform and be scalable. Security architecture is evaluated using Threat Modeling practices.