Organizing Technical Information

I like to organize information. Mostly because I tend to forget things. Here is a template of what I find useful.

This checklist includes items that an Architect should be responsible for when creating a service.

Items include:

General

  • Team Contact List
  • Calendar
  • Business need

Architecture

Captures the architecture and decision process of the service

  • Overview. High level overview of the service. What is the business reason for the service
  • Background
    • Expected Usage
    • SLA
    • Decision Logs
  • High Level Architecture Drawings
    • Logical
    • Physical
    • Data Flow Diagrams
  • Detail Architecture Drawings (Specific implementation details that are important or not obvious)
    • Authentication
    • Dependency Diagrams

  • Guiding Principles

  • High Availability Architecture
  • Monitoring
    • Analytics
    • Site Scope
    • Cacti
    • Logs
    • Profiling

Developer Documents

  • Project Source Control
  • Project Backlog
  • Project Bug list

Testing

  • Changelog
  • Test Data
  • Load Testing Results

Service API

  • Description
  • Wsdl Location (version X)
  • Requests (Itemize all request this service handles)
  • service Name (version X)
    • Description
    • Parameters
    • Response
    • Errors
    • Sample Request
    • Sample Response