Many projects do not have a holistic view of the overall system. Below are examples of some issues that point out problems in achieving a shared goal. Perhaps this describes your project:

• Are there ongoing discussions of the real goals of the project? Are requirements understood by all developers?
• If any developer is asked to describe the system under construction, would each one draw the same picture? Is there a commonly agreed upon "master blueprint"?
• Has anyone walked through how the system responds to errors or is everything discussed so far been only the "sunny day scenarios"?
• Is there a process in place for making all of the technical decisions and tradeoffs? Or is everyone "doing their own thing"?
• Is everyone coding away with the expectation that "it will all come together at the end"?
• Did the system have performance problems the first time it was demonstrated?

The Architecture Validation Review looks at the full range of the fit of the design to the problem at hand. The review is based on a process that has been delivered hundreds of times at Fortune 100 companies saving millions of dollars in development cost and project delays.

Haskell Technologies can conduct an independent review to assess the state of your system design for completeness of your approach.

Methodology

The Architecture Review consists of several areas:

• System requirements are reviewed for completeness on all issues needed to validate an architecture. Incomplete requirements have been shown to be a critical gap in many software projects.
• An examination of architecture and design documents is conducted to understand the big picture of the approach and how the developers organize a technical plan for the system.
• An extensive issues checklist is used during a moderated presentation and discussion session to guide the reviewers to probe into areas that have been shown to be problematic. Typical issues include technology selection, error handling, recovery, performance, system administration, and many related areas.
• Finally, a clear list of categorized, prioritized recommendations is offered to identify key problems that could cause the system to fail.