Mercenary Analyst

Problem: Supporting a design notation, and the related project documentation, is too tedious a job for people directly contributing to product artifacts.

Context:

You are assembling the roles for the organization. The organization exists in a context where external reviewers, customers, and internal developers expect to use project documentation to understand the system architecture and its internal workings. (User documentation is considered separately).

Forces:

If developers do their own documentation, it hampers "real" work.

Documentation is often write-only.

Engineers often don't have good communication skills.

Architects can become victims of the elegance of their own drawings (see rationale).

Solution:

Hire a technical writer, proficient in the necessary domains, but without a stake in the design itself. This person will capture the design using a suitable notation, and will format and publish the design for reviews and for consumption by the organization itself.

The documentation itself should be maintained on-line where ever possible. It must be kept up-to-date (therefore, Mercenary Analyst is a full-time job), and should relate to customer scenarios (Scenarios Define Problem).

Resulting Context:

The success of this pattern depends on finding a suitably skilled agent to fill the role of mercenary analyst. If the pattern succeeds, the new context defines a project whose progress can be reviewed (the pattern Review the Architecture) and monitored by community experts outside the project.

Design Rationale:

QPW; many AT&T projects (a joint venture based in New Jersey, a formative organization in switching support, and others). It is difficult to find people with the skills to fill this role.

"Here is another liability: beautiful drawings can become ends in themselves. Often, if the drawing deceives, it is not only the viewer who is enchanted but also the maker, who is the victim of his own artifice. Alberti understood this danger and pointed out that architects should not try to imitate painters and produce lifelike drawings. The purpose of architectural drawings, according to him, was merely to illustrate the relationship of the various parts... Alberti understood, as many architects of today do not, that the rules of drawing and the rules of building are not one and the same, and mastery of the former does not ensure success in the latter." -- [Rybczynski, p. 121].

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