Agile IT Architecture

Agile IT Architecture: "Software Development Life Cycle for BR-BPEL application
The purpose of this article is to present an integrated software life cycle for development team who wants to leverage the capabilities offered by technologies such as BPM-BPEL and Business rules management system.

Each new business application development is triggered by a business needs to support or enhance and improve business efficiency. Even with an Agile approach, to trigger the project, architect, business users, project manager and project sponsor have to work together during the Inception phase, to define the business case, the requirements and justifications of the project. Once the project funded, the team may work on specification and requirement documents. I simplify a little here because in reality a lot more documents may be produced, but the goal here is to present how those requirements are supported in an Agile way using the BRMS and BPM products and not discussing about requirements management. So let state the specifications are our main entry point to detail the major work that needs to be done for developing the applications. The format of the specification can be user stories, or a more detailed description. (a good reference to write specifications and user case is Alistair Cockburn work ). Specifications are classically managed by a standard SDLC which includes design, build, test, and deploy of working code to the different staging platforms (development, test, or production).

The Agile approach enforces short iterations to deliver quick value to the business. The blue tasks in the diagram below represent a set of iterations that build the core of the business application."