Best Practices for Implementing Effective Application Architecture

In this research paper Gartner analyst points out that “Cloud deployments, mobile interfaces and advanced analytics are changing the way in which applications need to be structured. Application managers must ensure that application architecture is effective in improving the versatility, usability, maintainability and robustness of applications.”

One of the key challenges is that architectural communications are sometimes inconsistent within application development team actives. Application architects must quickly determine which of their decisions are important for the success of the project. The primary activity here is balancing the project requirements (including time and budget) with architectural requirements — and identifying what decisions will need to be made, and which architectural tools make sense to implement those decisions.

Often time I see in our organization is that project requirements take the dominant position and architecture requirements are being neglected due to the constraint of time and budget. Application architects pay more attention to the project itself rather than architecture requirements. One of the examples is that when we try to implement an application, from desired architecture perspective we should consider cloud implementation which is in alignment with enterprise architecture principle and organization’s vision and strategies. In the meantime the cloud providers on the market cannot meet all project requirements at the moment. As an application architects we should balance the architecture requirements and project requirements, we can define a transitional architecture to provide business continuity while keep the architecture requirements. Sometimes it becomes battle and ends up architecture requirements are being neglected.

Best practices make sense but require education and communication within the organization especially between project teams and enterprise architecture team. Maturity of the organization enterprise architecture plays a big role for adopting best practices.