Systems Architect - Overview

Overview

In systems design, the architects and engineers are responsible for:

• Interfacing with the user(s) and sponsor(s) and all other stakeholders in order to determine their (evolving) needs.
• Generating the highest level of system requirements, based on the user's needs and other constraints such as cost and schedule.
• Ensuring that this set of high level requirements is consistent, complete, correct, and operationally defined.
• Performing cost-benefit analyses to determine whether requirements are best met by manual, software, or hardware functions; making maximum use of commercial off-the-shelf or already developed components.
• Developing partitioning algorithms (and other processes) to allocate all present and foreseeable requirements into discrete partitions such that a minimum of communications is needed among partitions, and between the user and the system.
• Partitioning large systems into (successive layers of) subsystems and components each of which can be handled by a single engineer or team of engineers or subordinate architect.
• Interfacing with the design and implementation engineers and architects, so that any problems arising during design or implementation can be resolved in accordance with the fundamental design concepts, and user needs and constraints.
• Ensuring that a maximally robust design is developed.
• Generating a set of acceptance test requirements, together with the designers, test engineers, and the user, which determine that all of the high level requirements have been met, especially for the computer-human-interface.
• Generating products such as sketches, models, an early user guide, and prototypes to keep the user and the engineers constantly up to date and in agreement on the system to be provided as it is evolving.
• Ensuring that all architectural products and products with architectural input are maintained in the most current state and never allowed to become obsolete.