Incremental Software Architecture

Chapter 8Business Analysis Drives End-State Architecture Structural Decomposition

In most cases, implementations of business processes could be discovered in different segments of an end-state architecture. The mission then is to identify sub-architectures in an end-state architecture by analyzing the business activities and the manner in which they achieve business goals. Doing this would ultimately help dissecting an end-state architecture into smaller design sections. This analysis may render answers to the vital questions that follow:

• What lines of business does the sub-architecture support? For example, lines of business of an insurance firm may include car insurance, home insurance, or life insurance.
• What type of business services does the sub-architecture offer? For instance, banking services online may include opening accounts, changing passwords, paying bills, transferring money, and more.
• How does the sub-architecture deliver business services? Does it employ applications, components, and middleware? Does it leverage a Web-based user interface? What data sources are being used to deliver business services?

There might be instances where an end-state architecture, however, would not divulge business implementations in the overall design. This would introduce challenges to the architecture classification efforts. In such case, refer to Chapter 9 that elaborates on end-state architecture decomposition by pursuing technical analysis practices.

Pursuing Business Analysis ...