Effective management of system capability is crucial for business success and sustenance of a competitive advantage. Architecture needs to address the relative balance between rapidly changing technology; dynamic business scenario, and integration with diverse systems without increasing the cost of software development and the complexity of software systems.​​

Architectural thinking is not expressed effectively to represent business concerns such as:

• How to modernize the hardware and software environments (reduce complexity in IT infrastructure)
• Increase the portability of applications
• Security challenges associated with the integration of multiple applications, devices, and data sources
• How a system can effectively communicate the change in a scenario or generate a new idea via multiple channels to the right stakeholders
• Monitoring the capability usage of system features and resources

The practice of system development can provide benefits in terms of quality and cost gains from adherence to architectural guidelines. A key premise of this logic is that important decisions may be made early in system development in a manner similar to the early decision-making found in the development of civil architecture projects.

Photon offers the following

To these ends, Photon recommends an approach that reflects the generally accepted practices for architectural description and provides a technical framework for further evolution in this area.

Photon initiates a criteria-based selection approach to describe how the system or product will be constructed; what the critical components are; and their fitment from a high-level, logical perspective. Mapping such selection against available templates helps to consider architecture principles for defining the system architecture, which addresses the visibility, changeability, and collaborates to meet defined quality expectations by the customers.

Key system or product scenarios are analyzed

• Domain, industry practices, and statistics
• Tools and technology usage
• Costs and timelines
• Learnings from a similar system

Before starting architecture, we ensure that the following points are identified

• Architectural principles applicable
• Best practices to be followed
• Quality of Service (QoS) to be achieved
• Integration need
• Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) product consideration

Besides standard description, sections included in the output are

• Behavior facts or metrics of the existing environment along with the structural integration and operational behavior of an organization
• How the concerns raised by various stakeholders are addressed and mapping metrics
• Rationale behind the selection of architectural principles and tradeoff considerations
• Metrics about the expected and targeted quality if architecture description is followed

Organizations have always been challenging software systems to solve newer and more complex problems by pushing boundaries of the existing technologies. It has been a perpetual race to implement better ways to facilitate operational efficiency, productivity, and save money through the usage of such competent software systems/products. The impact that the ever-changing face of technology has on businesses, compels organizations to look at various business avenues for their growth and survival.

The importance of technological evolution is nicely summarized by Lehman’s laws of software evolution, which says:

• Software systems must adapt to changes continuously or they progressively become less desirable
• As a system evolves, its complexity increases unless work is done to maintain or reduce it
• The quality of a software system will appear to be declining unless it is adapted for the changing business and technology environments.

To better prepare for the future, the impact of the changes in technology and markets, needs to be assessed, not just in terms of potential threats, but also as opportunities. For example, advancements in technologies such as big data and mobility have enabled organizations to process large volumes of data or scale their systems to billions of users, and provide services to users on mobile devices.

Technology roadmapping is a process of technology planning to achieve short-term and long-term business goals, while adhering to the business vision. It is a structured methodology for exploring and planning relationships between evolving markets, products, and emerging technologies over time.

he conventional or historically known good architectures and technology stacks fail to meet the performance and scalability expectations of the today’s business. The process of addressing performance and scalability issues becomes very challenging due to the rapid pace of technology evolution, increasingly diverse technology stacks, and complex deployment environments. Providing solutions to these needs under the constraints of existing technology choices, architectures, and investments calls for specialized performance and scalability engineering expertise, along with a deep knowledge of various use-case–specific technology stacks, middleware platforms, and compute alternatives.

Photon’s performance and scalability consulting services portfolio is designed to meet the unique multi-disciplinary needs of this problem domain. Armed with expertise in performance testing, performance and scalability engineering, distributed computing, and emerging technologies, Photon offers a comprehensive service portfolio to support the performance and scalability engineering needs of businesses.

The aforementioned services portfolio offers assessment of the system, which includes: