Roles & Responsibilities of Application Architect (AA)
AA is responsible for the architecture for their ART. The AA will spend most of their time in the Program and Team Layer. They are accountable to work with each scrum team in their ART to ensure that their designs are supporting the architecture direction received from the SAS, DAS and EAS. They own the execution of solution architecture vision through the scrum teams. AA will own the component architecture and implementation details, and create spikes for specific technology fulfilment.
AA is responsible for creating PHLD/HLD which includes business scenarios, API changes, NFRs, etc. AA is also responsible for working with SA and PO/TPO to refine program features when needed
AA provides technical direction and leadership for the capabilities of the entire solution within their domain/application by defining the technology infrastructure, decomposing solutions, and systems into components and subsystems, and defining and managing their interfaces and APIs. AA will provide in-depth technical knowledge required to assist TPO in translating features to actionable user stories for the teams
AA analyze technical trade-offs, determine the primary components and subsystems, identify the interfaces and collaborations between them, define Nonfunctional Requirements (NFRs).
AA play a critical role in aligning teams on the ART to a shared technical direction and partner with those teams in elaborating the solution, validating technology assumptions, evaluating implementation alternatives, and creating the Continuous Delivery Pipeline
AA may attend teams' Sprint Planning and/or Sprint Demo events to track progress, address issues, and adjust direction. They are also generally available to the teams for coaching, mentoring, and to ensure problems and issues are addressed quickly so that architecture is not a bottleneck.
Skills Required:
PHLD/HLD
Reference back to SHLD
Contains all Program Features for an ART related to the Epic
Non-Functional Requirements (NFR) (Technical architecture in support of NFRs, use Quality Attributes)
Architectural Models documented in SPARX or VISIO
Model data flow, sequence, and process flow for the feature in SPARX or VISIO