architecture question

Hullo

I appreciate that this may sound rather naive and I may have missed
something really obvious, but I've missed it and this looks like the correct
forum.

I'm used to large scale architectures for business applications. In my
experience, the biggest challenges are not very much to do with the
functional and data requirements of applications, they're bound up in higher
level assumptions around a few dimensions: such as time (eg
continuous/real-time vs discrete), consistency (all views of information
are/are not consistent), accuracy (eg numbers used for accounting that must
reconcile vs MIS information where approximate may be good enough - linked
to, but distinct from precision), currency (this value is the position in
the real world now, my current best guess or something else), error models
(eg ACID vs non-ACID), user populations (numbers, level of trust, skill
level, time available), scale, availability (eg regular downtime).  There
are others...

The biggest challenges tend to come from very old assumptions (~20 years
old) in line of business applications.

I'd expected that these would be the sorts of things that would be
considered by the architecture group, but I can't find them. Are they beyond
the scope of architecture in this context or are they considered elsewhere,
eg as an exercise for the implementation, but not part of the run-time
discovery/description process.

The stuff that I have seen looks like the focus areas for trying to get
ineroperation of newish applications in a reliable, robust environment,
which just feels unrealistic.

Have I missed something?

tia

Tim

Received on Wednesday, 20 March 2002 07:50:28 UTC