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In addition to collecting requirements, assessing existing features, sharing documentation resources, and drilling into areas of exploration, each team member provided hypothetical architectural diagrams which informed the face-to-face discussions.
Goals
At the beginning of the fly-in, the team defined and agreed on the following goals:
- Translating the Statement of VIVO's Product Direction for 2019 into an actionable architecture
- Engaging and incorporating technical efforts from parts of the VIVO community that have emerged adjacent to the core application
- Evolving VIVO into a more modular, cloud-ready application. This includes defining modules that can be deployed as separate services (containerized) as well as enabling the replacement of those modules with standard cloud services (AWS Neptune, Azure Cosmos DB, etc)
- Ensuring continuity for the community in order to facilitate incremental, manageable change.
Logistics
Great effort was put towards making sure that the discussions were open and supportive, and that there was space for the voices of all team members. Ground rules were established around:
- maintaining topic-focused discussions
- time-boxing sessions
- establishing goals for each session, and
- reviewing actions/takeaways from each session
The fly-in took place over the course of two days, starting at 9am and concluding at 5:30pm, followed by team dinners.
Opening considerations
Early in the fly-in,
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