Application architecture concerns

Sponsors interests

Know who the sponsors are. What their motivations are in bringing a software product. Is it a brave new thinking and disruption in terms of a idea that they want to realise or is it something that they want to bring in as a refinement over a legacy product that lacked architectural thinking. 

Will architecture change because of the above?  Architecture for a new idea or concept is not a real need in my opinion. A brand new product which is yet to see its customer base has other challenges like bringing a early version to the market as a Beta even to understand and refine the thought. Architecture for this would come in the way of realising this early versions. Short cuts even if they mean rapid prototyping with minimal design thoughts are good enough. When there is a demand for the product and it is steadily growing, then things like scalability, performance, availability all comes to the fore. What this means is architecture comes at a much later stage in this case.

The second category is a total product rewrite to replace a legacy product. This comes with a clear idea of existing customers and potential new customer base. This definitely require a clean architectural thinking right from the beginning. Architecture helps to avoid making mistakes of the legacy product that would have made it a burden to maintain, evolve or penetrate new markets. That normally would be the reason why sponsors would want to bring a architecture base. 

Bringing in a architecture early on structures the thinking around all the issues that floats on the surface of the legacy product over time. Also, a new architecture helps to get a leap to a different level taking advantage of the technical, technology evolutions since the legacy product. 

A third category is about re-factoring an existing product. This also require architectural thinking. But this most often may not be easy to have a cleaner structural arrangement as a total product rewrite. Re-factoring is mostly the case with legacy products as against a complete rewrite due to the cost, time pressures to bring out a better version to the customers. Often if the original product was shoddily designed, customers would bring in the pressure to have a better version as they would be bearing the brunt in terms of frequent patch upgrades. This triggers a re-factoring rather than a rewrite to allow for a quicker and better release. 

A re-factoring is always tricky than a rewrite because of the fact that it is always difficult to make sense of some one else's code. It is always rare to see a design or architecture document that is up-to-date reflecting the code which makes it even more difficult to achieve a clean partitioning. Thus re-factoring majorly is always a dream unless the original design team is remaining intact in full or part.