Banking Architecture Evaluation

Who? What?

Our client is a global organization providing banking, insurance, investments, mortgage and consumer finance. Their three lines of business had each built different architectural solutions for the same problem space. Each of the existing architectures were unsuitable as an across-the-board business solution for various reasons, so ThoughtWorks were brought in to independantly evaluate.

Why?

The client recognised state-of-the-art architecture evaluation offered them competitive advantage. ThoughtWorks leveraged a formal architecture evaluation method to prove critical design decisions and move a key project from design into delivery.

How?

We faced challenges including a fixed completion date, geographical distribution and the main stakeholders being allocated to other projects, but despite these barriers completed a formal evaluation (Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method, ATAM) successfully.

The evaluation began with the proposed architecture. The evaluation team worked with a group of representative stakeholders from across the business and identified, extracted, and distilled the relevant architectural strategies, as well as the forces behind them.

The next step was to elicit information about the architectural qualities, develop scenarios reflecting stakeholders' concerns, and prioritize them. This stage produced the criteria and the context for evaluating the proposed architecture.

Finally, the evaluation team used the evaluation scenarios to probe how the architecture supports the business drivers and how it deals with conflicting quality goals. The analysis identified architectural risks and design decisions affecting multiple quality goals. The evaluation team made recommendations for eliminating or mitigating the risks, such as changes to existing components and/or addition of new components communication pathways.

The Results?

Immediate results of the analysis included:

• Validated key design decisions
• Paved way for project delivery
• Provided the catalyst for reaching consensus across three lines of business.

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