Analysis / Assessment / Discovery workshop

Discovery / Assessment phase is the most critical and defining phase of any AEM upgrade. This phase is going to define the plan, efforts, and complexity of the upgrade.

1. One of the important steps in discovery phase is to do the dry run of the current production system. Other than this, this phase is also going the drive the changes that are required to make earlier version code compatible with latest one. 
2. Estimating upgrade project without complete analysis of the current system makes project cost overrun like anything. Hence, its important that a formal assessment of the current system should be done before estimating and same should be put into the discovery (assessment) report.
3. This assessment report becomes the key asset for upgrade. Depending on the complexity of the system, upgrade project may take 1 to 4 weeks of assessment.
4. The Discovery Workshops are the Adobe team’s opportunity to dive deep into the customer’s use cases to understand what it is that they are looking for.  From the information learned in these workshops and any follow-up conversations, the Product Backlog and Solution Design document will be created.  While the actual workshops performed should be tailored to your customer’s needs, some of the common workshops that are held include:
1. Review of the customer’s business – who are the users?
2. Current site review
3. User experience design for the new site
4. Business processes used to create content
5. Future plans for the site
6. Technical requirements to do the upgrade
7. Non-functional requirements such as user-load (author and publish), SLAs around up-time and response time, etc.
8. Content that will need to be migrated to the new site
9. Current and future architecture (logical as well as physical)
10. Infrastructure sizing details/Network and system architecture (current and future)
11. Post upgrade maintenance details (current and future)
12. Product customizations required
13. Application related customizations required
14. Deprecated components list and its mitigations
15. Integrations with any third party platforms or tag libraries
16. Integrations with other Adobe Marketing Cloud products
17. Any SEO requirements
18. Localization requirements and processes
19. Mobile/responsive requirements
20. Personalization requirements
21. Network and system architecture
22. Build and deployment management
23. Test plan

Here is a sample table of contents of an assessment report - 

1. CQ Environment
1. Logical Architecture
2. Physical Architecture
3. NFRs
4. Environments Deployed
5. Runmodes
6. Repository Configuration
7. Dispatcher Version
8. System Load and Scalability
9. Code and Content Flow
10. Components and Templates
11. Queries
12. Security
13. Redundancy and Availability
14. Systems Integration
2. Development Processes
1. Development Team
2. Agile Practice
3. Code Management Practices
3. Upgrade Impact Assessment 
1. Product customisation
2. Deprecated components
3. Current and future architecture state
4. Authoring & Business Processes
5. HTTP configuration review
1. Virtual host configurations
2. Dispatcher configurations
6. Code review 
1. Java Version
2. Maven Architecture
3. OSGi Services
4. Component Package
5. Workflows
6. OSGi Configurations
7. Components and Templates
8. Queries
7. Test Plan & Strategy