What?

High level designs give an overall idea to how a project and its components are structured, typically with the aid of a diagram. If you’ve worked with AWS or the CDI, you’ve probably seen some architecture diagrams outlining the flow of the app with various services – this is the sort of idea we’re talking about.

Why?

Following our previous survey surrounding how knowledge is currently shared within the department, we found that many of us care about high level designs of projects but we don’t actually know what they are for most of them unless we’re working on them.

As such, we decided to add some guidance around how to add this to the ops tracker as well as some examples of how you might want to structure your design info in the issue and the repo. We’re hoping that this is a light and simple change that people are happy to adopt since it should help us understand projects better at a high level – hopefully reducing the number of times we jump onto a project only to be overwhelmed and confused by how things are set up and trying to blindly feel our way around in the hopes of understanding.

That being said, the main burden will fall to project managers who will be tasked with making sure the designs are [still] relevant each TI and if they don’t exist, maybe it might be time to add them.

This will also result in a small update to the issue template – an aspect of the ops tracker and a key component of how we share knowledge within ARC – which we’d like your feedback and thoughts on in this survey if you’ve not yet completed it.