Estimate and Evaluate

• Know basic project management principles: As architect or lead developer you are often asked for estimates to realize your ideas: How long, how much, how many people, which skills, etc.? Of course, if you plan to introduce new tools or frameworks you need to have an answer for these kind of “management” questions. Initially, you should be able to give a rough estimate, like days, months or years. And do not forget that it is not only about implementing, there are more activities to consider, like requirements engineering, testing and fixing bugs. Therefore, you should know the activities the used software development process. One thing you can apply to get better estimates, is to use past data and derive your prediction from that. If you do not have past data, you can also try approaches such as COCOMO by Barry W. Boehm. If you are deployed in an agile project, learn how to estimate and to plan properly: The book “Agile Estimating and Planning” by Mike Cohn provides a solid overview in this area.
• Evaluate “unknown” architecture: As architect you should also be able to evaluate the suitability of architectures for the current or future context(s). This is not an easy task but you can prepare for it by having a set of questions at hand which are common for every architecture. And it’s not only about architecture but also about how the system is managed, as this also gives you insights about the quality. I suggest to always have some questions prepared and ready to use. Some ideas for general questions:
  • Design practices: Which patterns does the architecture follow? Are they consequently and correctly used? Does the design follow a red line or is there an uncontrolled growth? Is there a clear structure and separation of concerns?
  • Development practices: Code guidelines in place and followed? How is the code versioned? Deployment practices?
  • Quality assurance: Test automation coverage? Static code analysis in place and good results? Peer reviews in place?
  • Security: Which security concepts are in place? Built-in security? Penetration tests or automated security analysis tools in place and regularly used?