Search the practice set
126 questions, 454 terms and 400 topics in 20 areas.
56 results for “Business Continuity”
Business Capability
What a business does, expressed stably and independently of how it currently does it or who is responsible.
Application Portfolio Management
Maintaining an inventory of every application with its owner, cost, business value and technical health, and using it to decide what to invest in, replace or retire.
Booking.com's Experimentation Platform
Booking.com runs over a thousand concurrent experiments and treats the ability to test any change safely as a platform capability rather than a product feature.
Capability Map
A structured view of everything a business does, used as the stable frame for mapping applications, investment, ownership and gaps.
Compensating Transaction
A business operation that semantically undoes a previously committed step — not a rollback, because the original effect was visible and may not be fully reversible.
Disaster Recovery
The plan and capability for restoring service after an event that takes out a whole site, region or system.
Domain-Driven Design
Modelling software around the business domain, with boundaries drawn where the language of the business changes.
Microservices
An architectural style where an application is a set of independently deployable services, each owning its data and aligned to a business capability.
Outbox Pattern
Writing an outgoing message into a table in the same transaction as the business change, and relaying it to the broker separately, so the two cannot diverge.
Presenting to Executives
Leading with the decision and the business consequence, at a level of abstraction where technology names do not appear.
Priority Queueing
Classifying requests by business importance so that overload sheds the least valuable work first rather than an arbitrary slice.
Product Thinking
Treating what you build as something with users, a value proposition and a lifecycle, rather than as a project that completes.
RTO and RPO
How long recovery may take (RTO) and how much data may be lost (RPO), the two numbers that determine the cost of a resilience design.
Regulatory Constraint
A legal requirement that removes design options — and one that must be established early, because it is not negotiable and is expensive to retrofit.
Solution Architecture
The design of a specific system that satisfies a specific business problem under a specific set of constraints.
Spotify's Squad Model and Its Retrospective
The widely-copied Spotify model of squads, tribes, chapters and guilds was a snapshot that did not work as documented even at Spotify — a caution about importing organisational design.
Stakeholder Analysis
Identifying who is affected by an architecture, what each of them needs from it, and how much influence they have over whether it proceeds.
Surrogate Key
A system-generated identifier with no business meaning, used as the primary key instead of a naturally occurring business value.
TOGAF
An enterprise architecture framework whose central element is the ADM, an iterative cycle from vision through business, data, application and technology architecture to implementa…
Time to Market
How long it takes to get a capability in front of customers — often the constraint that dominates every other architectural quality.
Two-Pizza Team
Amazon's heuristic that a team should be small enough to be fed by two pizzas, and — the substantive part — should own its service end to end.
Value Stream
The end-to-end sequence of activities that delivers a result to a customer, viewed across whatever departments and systems it happens to cross.
A 15-year-old monolith runs the core of the business. Leadership wants microservices. How do you approach it, and what would make you refuse?
What the interviewer is testing Whether you start from the business problem or from the target architecture, and whether you are willing to say no. First, estab
A team wants to build a new internal API on serverless functions. It will serve steady traffic of about 200 requests per second during business hours. What do you advise?
What the interviewer is testing Whether you can apply the serverless trade off to a specific workload rather than treating it as a default good or a default bad
Security wants mandatory hardware keys for every login; the business says it will cost conversions. How do you resolve it architecturally rather than by picking a side?
What the interviewer is testing Whether you treat security as a fixed dial to be turned up, or as a risk proportionate design variable. Both stated positions ar
The business asks for "100% uptime" for a new customer portal. Walk me through the conversation that ends in an agreed SLO.
What the interviewer is testing Whether you can run a negotiation that ends in a number both sides own, rather than either capitulating or lecturing about nines
The business asks for "multi-region" after a regional outage. Before agreeing, what do you need to establish, and what are you actually signing up for?
What the interviewer is testing Whether you convert a vague requirement into numbers before designing, and whether you know that multi region is primarily a dat
A startup asks you to architect their product "to handle millions of users". They currently have none. What do you actually build?
What the interviewer is testing Whether you can identify the real constraint. The stated requirement is scale; the actual constraint is survival, and an archite
Southwest cancelled about 16,700 flights in December 2022 when crew scheduling could not recover from a storm, after years of deferred modernisation. How do you make that argument before the failure rather than after?
The case, as publicly reported A severe winter storm caused widespread cancellations across US carriers. Most recovered within days; Southwest did not. Its crew
Business Continuity
What the business does while the system is unavailable.
Business Architecture
General material on the business side of architecture.
Business Capabilities
What a business does, stated stably and independent of implementation.
Business Cases
Expressing an architecture proposal in the currency that gets funded.
Business KPIs
The numbers a design is ultimately judged against.
Business Metrics
Orders per minute alongside error rate, because healthy is not enough.
Business Processes
How work actually flows, including the handoffs nobody documented.
Business Understanding
Connecting a design to the outcome that pays for it.
Modernisation Business Case
Pricing tail risk so deferred maintenance becomes fundable.
API Gateways
The single entry point, and the business logic that must stay out of it.
Build vs Buy
Differentiation versus table stakes, priced over five years.
Capability Mapping
Overlaying systems onto capabilities to expose duplication and gaps.
Domain Boundaries
Where the language of the business changes, and services should too.
EA Domains
Business, application, data and technology architecture as viewpoints.
Operating Models
How delivery, platform and governance functions fit together.
Organisational Constraints
Team structure, skills and budget cycles as architectural inputs.
Outbox
Making the event atomic with the business write it describes.
Outcome Measurement
Knowing whether the thing you built achieved what it promised.
Platform as a Product
Adoption earned rather than mandated, with an owner and a roadmap.
Portfolio Prioritisation
Choosing between investments with incomparable benefits.
Product Thinking
Treating platforms and services as products with users and a lifecycle.
Regulatory Constraints
Non-negotiable requirements that remove design options entirely.
Stakeholder Analysis
Who is affected, what they need, and who can block you late.
Team Topologies
Stream-aligned, platform, enabling and complicated-subsystem teams.
Time to Market
The constraint that dominates most products, and how to trade against it.
Value Streams
End-to-end delivery of an outcome, and where the waiting happens.