Purpose
The VIVO architectural fly-in was focused on bringing an architecturally-minded team together who individually represent distinct VIVO stakeholder constituencies for the purpose of developing architectural approaches required to address the direction of the project. The primary goal of the two-day face-to-face meeting was to assess and document a plan for improving the VIVO application architecture towards enabling and realizing the technical efforts defined in the "Statement on VIVO's Product Direction for 2019".
Participants
- Huda Khan
- Andrew Woods
- Brian Lowe
- Justin Littman
- Ralph O'Flinn
- Benjamin Gross
- Jim Blake
- Richard Outten
- Alex Viggio
Leading up to the face-to-face meeting, the team convened six conference calls over two months with the goals of establishing a common understanding of:
- the purpose of the effort as well as
- the perspectives held by each team member.
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,
...and more
