On Monday January 13th 2020, I attended an event organized by Cyberwayfinder. The event thema was about the different types of architecture required to take care of business strategy, data, technology, security and risk in order to design a Digital Enterprise in a structured way.

The inspection process

At some point one of the presenters talked about an important process for Enterprise/Business/IT/Application Architects : the inspection of the delivery.

This is a well-known problem in IT projects: the target architecture is very often not respected for many good and bad reasons.

This raises the question of “inspection”. When do we inspect the work in progress as Enterprise Architects ? Do we have a mandate for inspection ?

Continuous or punctual inspection ?

We could imagine two types of inspection: continuous or punctual. The continuous inspection requires much more time but is maybe the only way in the context of agile projects…

What to do with deviations ?

At the end of an inspection, deviations could be identified. What can we do with such deviations ?

1. We accept the deviation and re-integrate it in the “AS-BUILT” architecture
2. We can ask an immediate rework because the deviation is not acceptable (e.g. bad implementation of security constraints)
3. We don’t accept the deviation but we don’t force the immediate rework : we register a “technical debt”.

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