Incremental Software Architecture

Chapter 5Application Discovery

There is good news coming from the application discovery space. Innovative tools and platforms are capable of discovering business implementations deployed to production. To address organizational problems, these business capabilities are delivered by systems. The vehicles that enable such delivery within a system are applications, which are the nucleus of business services offered to consumers. Application discovery tools then offer a diversity of production mapping capabilities to drill down into systems, identify applications, and even zoom farther down into an application's components and processes.

The term “application discovery” is about reconstructing and understanding business services. It is also about ascertaining business process patterns in production. During the application discovery process, we are searching for the business solutions and the approach pursued to meet their requirements. Remember, the emphasis is on the business imperatives and the way they are designed to deliver services. The incremental software architecture method calls for such a discovery activity to assess if indeed business goals can be achieved with the proposed end-state architecture.

Finally, before moving on, consider the mission of the application discovery:

• Identify what business solutions the ascertained business applications are devised to address.
• Study the various business services offered by the discovered applications.
• Identify the proposed design ...