Summary

The Planning Phase truly gets to the heart of an architecture-first development process. The project team gathered the requirements and created the application vision within the MSF Development Process Model's Envisioning Phase. Now with the MSF Development Process Model's Planning Phase, the team has designed the architecture for the application. This architecture provides the foundation to begin the creation of application code and executables. Having reached the Project Plan Approved Milestone, the team now knows how it is going to build the application and how long each step will take.

In this chapter, we looked at application architecture steps through the MSF Design Process's Conceptual, Logical, and Physical Designs. Each design represented the different level views for the application's layers, based on the MSF Application Model's user, business, and data service layers. We also identified specific deliverables of the Planning Phase, such as the Functional Specification, Master Project Plan, and Master Project Schedule.