Whats Next?

What's Next?

At this point, the architects have created their respective diagrams and validated them against each other, producing a deployment diagram and a resulting deployment report. Now it's time to get the developers online to implement the various applications and Web services and proceed with the construction of the software. The deployment report, which serves as a bill of materials, can be sent to the IT operations teams to prepare them for the deployment phase, which occurs later in the life cycle.

Are the architects done with Team System? This depends on your project and your team. I would say that the infrastructure architect is probably done with this iteration at this point and will return to Team System only if there is a need to alter the logical datacenter diagrams. This is a definite possibility with today's agile project methodologies.

TIP
Because not everyone on your team will have a copy of Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Architects, you should save a few printed screen images, such as the deployment report (with embedded diagrams), to the project portal for all the team members to refer to. I recommend saving the deployment report as a single Web Archive file (.mht) so that all the graphics are embedded into a single file. This makes uploading to the portal easy and maintains the fidelity of the report. You'll need to ensure that all your team members have at least version 5.0 of Microsoft Internet Explorer.

As for the application architects, because they are more aligned with software than hardware, they will likely continue to use Team System and assist with the project throughout its life cycle. Does this mean that they'll assist in the coding efforts? Maybe. Again, it depends on the team and the project.