Overview

The Analysis and Design workflow is the heart of the Elaboration phase, where you focus on the development of the architecture for your project. Your architectural efforts in this workflow are driven by your organization/enterprise-level architectural efforts (a key aspect of the Infrastructure Management workflow of Chapter 5) focusing on how your system will work from end-to-end all the way from the user interface to your persistent storage approach. With the organization/enterprise-level domain and technical architectures as your base, you will create a software architecture document (SAD) describing your architectural design based on the information contained in your requirements model. You will then build a technical prototype to prove that your architecture works. (This is the focus of the Implementation workflow during the Elaboration phase, covered in detail in vol. 3: The Unified Process Construction Phase.) Next, you will validate that it works as part of the Test workflow (Chapter 7). You may find that your organization/enterprise-level architecture will be sufficient for your project team and that all you need to do is add new business functionality to it. You may also find that your project-level architectural efforts will provide valuable feedback that your enterprise architecture team can use to improve your organization/enterprise-level architectural models.

Build the bones, the skin (the UI), and just enough muscle to make it work. Construction is all about building the rest of the muscle. Ivar Jacobson

There are several reasons why you want to build a technical...