Solution Design and Delivery Best Practices
From design to delivery
A credible solution design starts with the Process Definition Document and a Solution Design Document that records the target process, application models, object reuse, exception strategy, queue design, security roles, and non-functional requirements. Design work should follow a lifecycle: define, design, build, test, deploy, and then operate with monitoring and change control.
Separation of concerns is the spine of good design: processes orchestrate, objects interact, queues decouple and buffer, and environment variables hold configuration. Build a reusable object library rather than duplicating interaction logic. Testing must be layered: unit-test each Action, component-test each Process page, then run end-to-end and volume tests against realistic data, including exception and recovery paths.
Traps in questions
- Treating the design document as optional paperwork; questions reward traceability from requirement to test.
- Hard-coding credentials, URLs, or file paths instead of using environment variables and credential stores.
- Skipping negative testing - the exception paths are usually where defects hide.
- Designing a single monolithic process with no queue, which blocks throughput and loses work on failure.
- Ignoring operational handover: logging, alerting, and a defined change process.
Rule of thumb
Design for change and for failure. Anything that differs between environments belongs in configuration; anything that can fail needs a defined recovery and a log entry a human can act on.
Worked example
A candidate is asked how to handle a new test environment. Correct: parameterise endpoints and credentials as environment variables and credentials, leaving process and object logic unchanged; changing code per environment is a maintenance trap and a security risk.