Application Design Framework (ADF)

Purpose

Is your organization struggling to ship software on-time, on-budget, and in-line with expectations? The Application Design Framework (ADF) helps address these challenges by transforming abstract business requirements into concrete architectural decisions through proven guidelines and tools. Teams can accelerate innovation while building resilient, secure, and cost-effective solutions. This approach benefits executives (reduced lead times, KPI definitions), product managers (alignment on requirements, accurate ETAs), and engineers (tools for translating requirements into technical design). The result? Faster time-to-market, reduced costs, and improved project success rates.

Definitions

Application boundary [1]:

Architecture [2][3]:

Component [4]:

Mindset

Application is an ownership boundary.

Application boundary should evolve with organizational and software changes.

Guidelines

Describe use case (Sales, Marketing, Product) to clarify the problem and define business requirements.

Write stories (Product, Engineering) to scope implementation.

Define architecture (Product, Engineering) to address business and define technical requirements.

Choose technologies (Engineering) to address technical requirements.

Write code (Engineering) to implement business and technical requirements.

Examples

Templates

Ongoing research

References

  1. Martin Fowler - ApplicationBoundary
  2. AWS Well-Architected Framework - Definitions
  3. Neal Ford and Mark Richards - Software Architecture: the Hard Parts
  4. Martin Fowler - SoftwareComponent
  5. Martin Fowler - User Story
  6. Gregor Hohpe - The Many Facets of Coupling
  7. Matthew Skelton - Designing organizations for responsiveness
  8. AWS Well-Architected Framework - Pillars