Product Architecture

AIoT Framework: Product Architecture

The idea of a product architecture might seem old fashioned to somebody who is used to working in small, agile development teams. After all, the Agile manifesto itself values working software over comprehensive documentation and emphasizes The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation. However, in large-scale, multi-team, multi-site projects, a certain amount of documentation is required in order to ensure that all teams and stakeholders are aligned and working in synch. Many AIoT projects will have this problem. Consequently, Ignite AIoT proposes to create and maintain an AIoT Solution Architecture which captures key requirements and design decision in a consistent manner. In order to achieve this, the following viewpoints are proposed:

• AIoT Business Viewpoint: Builds on the input from the Business Model, adds the capability perspective
• AIoT Usage Viewpoint: Focus on how users, assets and other system elements are using the AIoT solution
• AIoT Functional Viewpoint: Focus on the data and functional components of the AIoT solution
• AIoT Implementation Viewpoint: Focus on the implementation aspects
• AIoT Product Viewpoint: Mapping to the agile product development perspective

It is important to notice that Ignite AIoT is not proposing an excessive, RUP/waterfall-style model depth, as can be seen when looking at the individual templates. The general idea of collaboration between the different project stakeholders in the architecture management process is shown in the figure below.

The key to success here is to keep the AIoT Solution Architecture on a level of detail where it is meaningful but not overly complex. The agile teams must be able to apply their own mechanism (e.g. demand-driven design spikes) to derive requirements for their backlog and provide feedback to the overarching architecture in return.

Authors and Contributors

DIRK SLAMA (Editor-in-Chief) AUTHOR Dirk Slama is VP and Chief Alliance Officer at Bosch Software Innovations (SI). Bosch SI is spearheading the Internet of Things (IoT) activities of Bosch, the global manufacturing and services group. Dirk has over 20 years experience in very large-scale distributed application projects and system integration, including SOA, BPM, M2M and most recently IoT. He is representing Bosch at the Industrial Internet Consortium and is active in the Industry 4.0 community. He holds an MBA from IMD Lausanne as well as a Diploma Degree in Computer Science from TU Berlin.