Implement and track improvements

The ideal outcome of successful implementations is a reduction in HRIs and MRIs, resulting in an improvement to the architectural health of your workload.

Implementation of remediations should be done iteratively, using milestones in the WA Tool that record the state of a workload at a particular point in time. Each time you conduct a review session, or when you complete improvement items, save a milestone to measure the progress as you go.

WAFR in agile

The output from a WAFR prioritization exercise can be used to prioritize tickets for sprints and backlogs for development teams. Developers should be able to understand the impact of the implementations and own the contribution to an improved architectural health. WAFR improvement and tracking can be integrated in an agile retrospective.

Retrospectives are meetings held at the end of an iteration or sprints. During the retrospective, the team reflects on what happened in the iteration and identifies actions for improvement going forward. It is an ideal mechanism to include WAFR reviews for discussion and empower members in architectural health.

Timeline

The timeline for these steps varies per organization, as every organization is different and has unique challenges. However, following successful WAFRs performed with many customers at AWS, we recommend this phase to take between 90 and 180 days.

If your list of HRIs and MRIs takes longer, re-prioritize them and come up with a shorter list so that you can start practicing the process to get some improvement. Then, repeat with your remaining items.