6.5 — Supporting the Lifecycle Phases

CCAR-P Domain 6 · Task 6.5

What You Need to Know

Phases are gated by outputs, not dates. The architect’s job does not end at deployment.

Phase Outputs

Phase	Must produce
Discovery	Measured baseline, agreed success criteria, data/compliance assessment, named owner
Design	Architecture + decision records, evaluation plan, oversight/control design, service-level envelope
Build & validate	System + measured performance against agreed criteria (demo ≠ measurement)
Handoff	Transferred ownership (more than transferred code)
Operate & monitor	Trend against criteria; working incident loop
Iterate	Evidence-gated changes that re-enter design

Ownership Transfer = Capability Transfer

Receiving team must be able to:

1. Run evaluations and get a comparable answer
2. Read a trace well enough to localise a failure
3. Roll a change back
4. Know who to reach when none of that is enough

Missing any → operate but refuse to change (paralysis mistaken for stability).

Iteration Is Evidence-Gated

Prompt edits against last week’s complaints without a regression suite = each edit fixes the reported case and silently moves an unreported one.

Certain Events

Model deprecation, corpus migrations, connector/dependency changes, regulatory change, business-process redesign. Plan for them in design. On deprecation notice: test replacement early, audit usage by API key/model, re-benchmark cost and latency.

Quiet is not evidence. A system with no complaints, a baseline nobody has re-run, and a moved corpus is unevidenced, not healthy.

Going Backwards Is Professional

When production evidence contradicts a discovery assumption, return to discovery. Carrying on because the plan says so buys a delivery date and loses the outcome.

Exam Traps

• Reading a quiet, complaint-free system as healthy and waiting for drift to be reported
• Handing a model deprecation to the commercial/vendor-relationship owner
• Shipping prompt edits against last week’s complaints and calling it iteration
• Continuing to build against a discovery assumption that production evidence has already contradicted