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 needs into concrete architectural decisions through easy to use and proven guidelines. This approach benefits executives (reduced time-to-market), product managers (accurate ETAs), and engineers (alignment on requirements). The result? Faster delivery, lower risk, and more resilient, cost-effective solutions.

Tenets

  1. Use case-driven. Every decision should be guided by the use case. If it doesn’t serve one, it’s out of scope.
  2. Traceability matters. Every use case should map to architecture, and architecture to code. Anyone should be able to follow the thread.
  3. Architecture first, technology second. Architecture satisfies business and technical requirements; technology implements them. Separate architecture and technology decisions to reduce cognitive load.

Definitions

Application boundary [1]:

Architecture [2][3]:

Component [4]:

Mindset

Application is an ownership boundary.

Application boundary may change over time.

Estimates are more accurate after choosing technologies.

Guidelines

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

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. Giulia Rossi and Dave Brown - Working backwards: Amazon’s approach to innovation
  6. Martin Fowler - User Story
  7. Gregor Hohpe - The Many Facets of Coupling
  8. Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais - Team Topologies
  9. AWS Well-Architected Framework - Pillars