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Establish Technical Architecture Reference Set

Describe the Agency-wide Technical Architecture in a set of documentation that system designers and developers can readily access and use.

Overview
Activities

Overview

These engineering activities create and maintain the individual design descriptions and ensure that they integrate with one another. This results in a release of the A-TARS, describing the essential characteristics of the Agency systems and the associated engineering and management practices. Information on the A-TARS can be found in the background portion of the guide.

Key activities and their relationships are shown in the figure below. Each set of activities corresponds to producing or updating a portion of the A-TARS. The process is highly iterative; an A-TARS product that is used to guide a later process step may require changes as more detail is added to the A-TARS sections. For example, the Technology Boundaries Descriptions are fundamental to all the architecture processes, but as new technologies are considered, the boundaries may be adjusted to leverage these opportunities.

Each step in the engineering process incrementally releases one or more drafts that are used as the basis of the other activities, which in turn will feed back changes to improve the drafts. The first three activities (describing the boundaries, properties, and the Technical Reference Model), can be highly interactive because decisions on one may affect assumptions another makes. For example, an end-user goal analysis may indicate the types of application-level services to be provided, leading to the definition of the application level services in the TRM. Analysis done when building the TRM may identify overlooked end-user capabilities, which can provide opportunities to add, modify, or change those end-user goals.

A release of the A-TARS occurs when the elements produced by the activities are consistent with one another. A release of the A-TARS may correspond to one or more plateaus.

The Architecture Team has primary responsibility to perform these activities.

Block diagram of the Establish A-TARS activities that update the A-TARS. The activities flow in the following order: Describe Technology Boundaries, Establish Agency System Properties, Establish Technical Reference Models, Describe Integrated Technology Blueprint, and Describe Technology Elements. The Develop Technical Guidelines activity and the previously mentioned activites all flow into the Integrate, Review, and Release the A-TARS activity. The activities are described in the following text.

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Activities

Developing the A-TARS involves the following key activities:
  1. Describe Technology Boundaries. Establish the types of technologies and capabilities needed to support current and future users and external systems.
  2. Establish Agency System Properties. Establish the essential characteristics and principles guiding the design decisions.
  3. Establish Agency Technical Reference Models Identify and organize the types of technical elements to be incorporated into the HS Agency's systems.
  4. Describe Integrated Technology Blueprint Describe how the architectural elements work together at the application and systems levels.
  5. Describe Technology Elements. Describe the elementary building blocks that are used to build applications. These activities are further decomposed for each technology specialty area into which the building blocks are separated.
  6. Develop Technical Guidelines. Provide guidelines on technology management and engineering practices that are used across the HS Agency.
  7. Integrate, Review, and Release the A-TARS. Compile the descriptions into a consistent set of descriptions and transition them into use.

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Last Updated: May 4, 2005