CHAPTER 12
Designing J&S Food's Smart Shopping Bag Digital Product

Ultimately, the best operating model is one that is owned and accepted by the teams.

—Thomas Blood

The three-day digital products and services specification process (Chapter 11, “Specifying J&S Food’s Smart Shopping Bag Digital Product”) of J&S Food's agile operational model is now validated, followed by the smart shopping bag architecture design process, which ended three days later.

In a validation meeting, as the leader of the task force you once again have the responsibility to validate J&S Food's new agile operating model process: the digital products and services design.

Throughout this process, the stake was the application of agile principles in terms of work organization, people interactions, decision-making, and problem-solving, as well as that of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) of identifying packages likely to be implemented as microservices.

The leaders of the digital business model deployment (Albany) and of the smart shopping bag development (Princeton) teams are now going to co-present the feedback report.

Let's pay attention to the message the Albany and Princeton team leaders deliver to the task force.

Transformation Journey's Fourth Stage: Designing the Smart Shopping Bag Digital Product

Evaluation of J&S Food's new digital products and services design process in actual business conditions is the primary purpose of this phase. Figure 12.1 shows the highlights that will be discussed in the validation meeting.

Figure 12.1: The digital product design phase in J&S Food's digital transformation journey

As illustrated in Figure 12.1, these highlights include the agile operational model's confirmation as the foundation of the company's work organization, the smart shopping bag's package architecture, and the set of competencies acquired by the company during this phase.

Let's take a look at the feedback report that the Princeton store's product development team issued to the task force.

The Agile Operational Model Confirmed as the Foundation of J&S Food's Work Organization

The first message of the report is clear: J&S Food's staff has definitely adopted the agile operational model as well as the underlying infrastructure and tools.

J&S Food's New Organization of Work

Albany's team leader starts by announcing the good news:

---

“Our teams have adopted the new work environment. In addition, the agile processes have significantly improved the team's productivity, the digital product design process responsiveness, and also product quality.”

---

The Princeton’s Digital Product Development Team Defined

Albany's team leader explained the following:

---

“Unlike the old monolithic organization that mixed IT application and digital service developments, today's digital product development department is a distinct entity, fully dedicated to J&S Food's digital products and services development activities.”

---

Figure 12.2 illustrates J&S Food's digital products and services organization.

Figure 12.2: J&S Food's new digital products and services development organization

As illustrated in Figure 12.2, the new J&S Food's IT organization is structured around two distinct entities immersed in the company's agile operating model: the business applications development department and the digital products and services development department.

The Princeton's team leader justifies this division as follows:

---

“The reason for the split is that putting product developers together is more likely to keep the team's focus on the digital product development business, fostering information sharing, and therefore accelerating the learning curve.”

---

In fact, the primary reason for this division is that applications and digital services target different populations: internal business users for applications and customers for the digital product development.

Digital products and services development has a direct impact on J&S Food's revenues—it requires additional methodologies, such as understanding customer insights, developing user experience, and business case development.

The Princeton's team declares the following:

---

“The new digital product development team is consistent with Scrum team principles. It puts together relevant sales, marketing, and IT contributors under the leadership of the product owner and Scrum master.”

---

Table 12.1 outlines the roles and responsibilities of Princeton's team in the smart shopping bag design process.

Table 12.1: Roles and Responsibilities in the Smart Shopping Bag Design Process

ROLES	ORIGIN	RESPONSIBILITY
Product owner	Online marketing	Initiates digital products and services projects. Leads digital products and services specifications. Provides digital products and services testing scenarios.
Scrum master	Information technology (IT)	Acts as a project management office (PMO) representative. Facilitates communication between the business side and IT. Facilitates digital product development effort from specification and development to deployment.
Software developers	Information technology (IT)	Contributes to the digital products and services specification as well as to the architectural design effort. Develops the software enabling the digital products and services, tests it, and contributes to the CICD pipeline configuration.
Software testers	Information technology (IT)	Works with the software developers, IT operations, and business users on designing testing scenarios. Configures the build and acceptance testing stages of the CICD pipeline. Monitors automated build and acceptance testing processes.
IT operations	Information technology (IT)	Works with the product owner and Scrum master as well as with software development, software testing, and business users on the deployment strategy. Contributes to the acceptance test stage of the CICD pipeline. Configures the production stage of the CICD pipeline.
Business users	Marketing, sales, other business units	Contributes to the configuration of build and acceptance testing stages of the CICD pipeline. Monitors the acceptance tests in collaboration with the software developers and software testers.

In perfect sync with Princeton's team leader, Albany's project leader announces another piece of good news:

---

“Our digital products and services design process performs beyond expectations.”

---

UML Package Diagram Facilitates the Microservices Architecture Design Process

Albany's team leader explains the digital products and services design process in J&S Food's agile operational model as follows:

---

“Digital products and services architecture design takes place in the early stages of the agile process in a planning meeting known as a ‘planning game’ through what we now refer to as ‘architectural spike.’”

---

Princeton's team leader provides further details as follows:

---

“Architectural spikes are organized as workshops involving the product owner, Scrum master, developers, testers, and IT operations. The primary goal of an architectural spike is to eliminate technical risks by writing just enough code to explore the use of a technology or a technique with which the product development team is unfamiliar.”

“Our architectural spikes stress one fundamental area; that is, the microservices that make the software underpinning digital product modular enough to ensure responsiveness and scalability.”

---

Lucidchart Confirmed as the Best Architecture Tool

Albany team's leader informs the participants that Lucidchart Enterprise was chosen as the best UML tool, and then Princeton's team leader explains how this was determined:

---

“During the workshops, the UML formalism provided by Lucidchart Enterprise was used by both the business and IT side teams as a common and rich visual modeling language for architecting the complex smart shopping bag system both structurally (architectural components) and behaviorally (system reactions to events).”

---

Overall Feedback

As Table 12.2 shows, J&S Food's staff from both the business and IT sides praised the benefits of the company's new agile operational model.

As Figure 12.3 shows, a large majority of J&S Food staff is satisfied with the new working environment.

Eighty-eight percent of the staff involved in the smart shopping bag architectural design process are fully satisfied with the company's new agile operating model, 8 percent have mixed feelings about it, while only 4 percent are unsatisfied with it.

Table 12.2: J&S Food's Satisfaction with the Agile Operational Model

	PRODUCTIVITY	TIME-TO-MARKET	QUALITY
Business side	Team spirit and collaborative mindset increase the team's productivity.	The workshops involving staff from the business and IT sides accelerate the overall design process.	Team and collaborative mindsets as well as the architecture workshops involving staff from both the business and IT sides help to achieve quality design.
IT side	Architectural design patterns and tools increase the team's productivity.	The various visual tools used impact the overall time to market.	Same as above.

Figure 12.3: J&S Food's staff satisfaction with the new operational model

Overall, the involved staff prefer the agile digital business work environment because of the processes provided, best practices, methodologies, and tools that increased productivity, sped up processes, and guaranteed better deliverable quality.

The Resulting Smart Shopping Bag's Architecture

The implemented agile operational model, with all of its underlying methodologies and tools, has equipped J&S Food with the ideal digital products and services development platform. That's the message that Princeton's team leader, a passionate mind, is trying to convey to the audience.

The Smart Shopping Bag Blueprint

Princeton team's leader next explains the following:

---

“The blueprint (see Figure 12.4) represents our smart shopping bag's logical microservices architecture. It results from the strict application and use of our architectural spikes principles, processes, tools, and methodologies. In the old organization, we would have taken twice as much time to deliver such an architecture.”

---

Figure 12.4: The smart shopping bag component diagram (designed with Lucidchart Enterprise)

The Princeton team leader now elaborates on the smart shopping bag component diagram as follows:

---

“The folders, packages in UML terminology, represent the AWS containers and Docker containers that encapsulate the microservices underpinning the smart shopping bag digital product.”

---

The Princeton team leader then states the following:

---

“The UML component diagram makes the translation of the logical architecture into a concrete microservices architecture easy and fast. Packages are converted into containers, class operations are translated into AWS Lambda functions implementing the microservices, and package interfaces are the APIs giving access to the microservices.”

---

The In-Store Customer Package

The in-store customer package represents the AWS container hosting the microservices that support all processing related to the in-store customer, smart shopping bag, and smart mobile device objects.

Table 12.3 outlines the in-store customer package constituents as well as their role in the overall architecture.

Table 12.3: Description of the In-Store Customer Package's Constituents

	DESCRIPTION
In-store customer	This class implements the microservices related to the business entity in-store customer.
Smart shopping bag service	Implements the microservices related the business entity smart shopping service.
Smart mobile device	Implements the microservices related to the business entity smart mobile device.
Interface	This interface class implements the API gateway and event-driven mechanisms that give access to the microservices implemented by the classes that form the in-store customer package.

The Shopping Session Package

The shopping session package represents the AWS container hosting the microservices that support all processing related to the shopping session and smart shopping bag application objects.

Table 12.4 outlines the shopping session package constituents as well as their role in the overall architecture.

Table 12.4: Description of the Shopping Session Package Constituents

	DESCRIPTION
Shopping session	Implements the microservices related the business entity smart shopping session
Smart shopping bag application	Implements the microservices related to the business entity smart shopping bag application
Interface	This interface class implements the API gateway and event-driven mechanisms that give access to the microservices implemented by the classes that form the shopping session package

The Smart Shopping Bag Package

The smart shopping bag package represents the AWS container hosting the microservices that support all processing related to the smart shopping bag application, the RFID reader, and product RFID tag objects.

Table 12.5 outlines the smart shopping bag package constituents as well as their role in the overall architecture.

Table 12.5: Description of the Smart Shopping Bag Package Constituents

	DESCRIPTION
Smart shopping bag	This class implements the microservices related to the business entity smart shopping bag.
RFID reader	Implements the microservices related the business entity RFID reader.
Product RFID tag	Implements the microservices related to the business entity product RFID tag.
Interface	This interface class implements the API gateway and event-driven mechanisms that give access to the microservices implemented by the classes that form the smart shopping bag package.

Acquired Digital Business Competency: Digital Products and Services Architecture Design

In this design phase of the smart shopping bag's architecture, J&S Food's staff acquired the following skills:

• Deployment of agile operating model for digital business including staff training and implementation of a digital products and services development department
• Design of microservices architecture based on UML and Lucidchart Enterprise design web-based platform

Key Takeaways

Designing digital products and services in an organizational change management context within a disruptive industry is not easy—it's challenging! It takes training the concerned staff in record time, enforcing the agile operational and organizational requirements, and identifying areas of improvements.

The example illustrated in this chapter confirms that setting up a task force to lead the change and assigning the operational responsibility of the change deployment to enthusiastic and motivated people is the right thing to do.

In this chapter, you learned about the benefits of productivity, responsiveness, and quality that an organization can derive from implementing an agile operating model. You also learned that setting up an organization dedicated to the development of digital products and services is an option likely to accelerate your staff's learning curve.

Finally, you learned how the object-oriented approach through UML as implemented by J&S Food allows them to design a microservices architecture quickly.

In the follow-up task force meeting described in the next chapter, you will learn how Amazon SageMaker is used to support J&S Food's digital food experience and how combining the prototyping approach and AWS Amplify platform helped the Princeton team develop the microservices and software underlying the smart shopping bag digital product in record time.

References

1. 1.  Christopher Smith, “Change Management vs. Digital Transformation — What's the Difference?,” Change (December 23, 2018). https://change.walkme.com/change-management-vs-digital-transformation/
2. 2.  James Davidson, “Change Management: The Key to Successful Digital Transformations,” CMSWire (July 30, 2018). https://www.cmswire.com/digital-workplace/change-management-the-key-to-successful-digital-transformations/
3. 3.  Muntazir Fadhel, “Why Object-Oriented Code Accelerates Microservices Adoption,” DZone (March 21, 2019). https://dzone.com/articles/why-object-oriented-code-accelerates-microservices
4. 4.  Holly Avila, “Digital Product Development vs Application Development,” Big Nerd Ranch (September 15, 2020). https://bignerdranch.com/blog/digital-product-development-vs-app-development/