Initial Solution Design

Ignite | IoT Solution Delivery defines a set of key artifacts for the Initial Solution Design, which are shown in the figure below. We differentiate between artifacts that cover analysis, projections and planning, functional design artifacts, and technical design artifacts. Although they may be created in parallel, it often makes sense to group them as described in this section.

Some of the artifacts that Ignite | IoT Solution Delivery proposes are not IoT-specific at all, for example the milestone plan. Some artifacts have IoT-specific extensions, such as the proposed quantity structure or the SOA landscape for IoT solutions. And some artifacts have been created specifically for IoT solution design, such as the IoT project dimensions, the IoT Solution Sketch, or the Asset Integration Architecture. In this section of the book, we want to focus more on how a project team can work with these artifacts in the design phase. For this reason, we will only offer examples here and then provide more formal definitions later in the “Building Blocks” section.

Specialized design artifacts have a long history in software design. Most notably, the Rational Unified Process (RUP) is based on an exhaustive set of specialized software design artifacts for the different perspectives and phases of a software project. RUP drew some criticism for being too artifact heavy in the past. Agile approaches such as SCRUM often rely on very basic artifacts like user stories, rather than architecture artifacts. From an agile perspective, “the code is the truth.” Ignite | IoT Solution Delivery tries to strike a balance here between these two extremes. In our experience, it can be very helpful to rely on certain standardized architecture and design artifacts to ensure common understanding between the different project stakeholders. In order to ensure this, Ignite | IoT Solution Delivery has to ensure that the artifacts are sufficiently lightweight, yet sufficiently expressive, and that the different artifact types integrate well with each other while minimizing redundancies.