Incremental Software Architecture

Chapter 6Application Mapping

It is inconceivable that some organizations would not leverage existing technologies to discover and analyze their production environments, especially when the architecture is vast and complex. There is no defense against ignoring such vital activity. Not being able to view an integrated ecosystem graphically is a symptom of organizational blindness that typically leads to grand-scale system and application failures.

What is this all about? The capability to discover how applications are integrated is an immense advantage over lack of vision. The ability to trace message flows and spot routes of business transactions in an intricate production environment reduces maintenance and configuration expenditure.

Ever-changing production environments introduce enormous challenges to asset management and business continuity. The ability to follow such trends, monitor how an environment is evolving, and observe the rapid pace of technological progression bestows an overwhelming advantage over the competition.

In the context of the discovery and analysis process, when an end-state architecture is in its conceptual stage, proposed on paper, the process calls for identifying the dependencies of an application on its peers and supporting environment. In this case, mapping application with tools would be an impossible task to accomplish, since the implementation would not exist. However, the work of mapping such a conceptual proposition could still take place to ...