Roles: Architect

The architect has overall responsibility for defining and describing the architecture, as well as driving major technical decisions.

After reading Secure Design Best Practices, architects who are part of a software development team may find this page useful as the weaknesses are addressed by known security tactics, helping the architect in embedding security throughout the initial design process.

"Architecture is the fundamental organization of a system embodied in its components, their relationships to each other, and to the environment, and the principles guiding its design and evolution." [IEEE 1471]

This document provides a guideline for tracking dependencies between architecture activities. A dependency exists when a specific activity needs to be executed before another activity can be executed or even started.

This document provides a guideline for structuring architecture documentation in the PAPCP R&D environment.

Architecture Review Goals

Performing an Attack Surface Analysis includes analyzing the security architecture to identify and document product interfaces and surfaces that could be attacked, as well as consider if there are planned security measures that will provide enough protection against attacks on these surfaces.

The "Definition of Ready" (DoR) are the checks performed when a system epic, epic, feature, story, or bug is defined and ready to start work on. The "Definition of Done" (DoD) is the checks performed when the work items are completed before it is closed.

Threat modeling is the process of analyzing various business and technical requirements of a system identifying the potential threats, the mitigations of these threats, and documenting the vulnerabilities these threats have on the system.

This guide describes how to handle epics in streams. It includes examples of epic descriptions and information about the epic definition, grooming, and change management.

This guide describes how to handle features in streams. It includes examples of feature descriptions and information about the feature definition, grooming, and change management.

The purpose of this guide is to provide handson support to the roles involved in defining the system architecture influenced by requirements, captured in the system epics, epics, and features.

This guide describes how to handle system requirements and system epics. It includes descriptions and information about the system requirement / system epic definition, workflow, grooming, and change management.

For a new epic, feature, or user story, there may be a need to write new test cases or modify existing test cases. The purpose of this guide is to provide handson support to the roles involved in writing, updating, or reviewing test cases of a product.

Product capabilities describe what the product “can do” for anyone who wants to understand its capabilities. They represent the product's property and are updated throughout its lifecycle through multiple releases.

Software architecture is not a static document, instead, it's a continuous iterative process throughout each increment. This guide serves as a reference for the roles providing and describing different levels of architecture.

This guide describes how system requirements in Decision Focus are broken down into system epics, epics and features in Azure DevOps (ADO).

This chapter gives some basic best practices for a secure software design. Assessing how security is addressed in the design of a product is one important step to ensure that the product meets the best security level and can be done at various points in a product lifecycle.

The Security Criticality Analysis is performed to identify which of the components in a product are important to pay extra attention to when trying to minimize the risk of vulnerabilities.

This guide describes what system interfaces are, how they are documented, and how they are managed.

A system requirement review intends to improve the quality of the requirements. It applies both to system requirements and technology requirements.

This guide describes the what, why, and how related to the versioning of architecture documents.