Checkpoint challenge

Original, scenario-based practice. Never modeled on actual exam questions. It’s written in the “What I Would Architect” style: the point is making your judgment visible, not picking a letter. This challenge closes Part 1 of the Integration Architect course; my walkthrough comes in Checkpoint 1, so try it first.

Scenario

Steve Trucking is a last-mile delivery company. Big-box Retail Partners sell appliances, TVs and furniture; Steve Trucking’s two-person crews deliver them to the Retail Partners’ customers (the Recipients), install some of them and haul the old ones away. Read the Steve Trucking brief, sections 1–8. Leave section 9 (the late changes) alone; those come at the end of the course.

Requirements

Everything in the brief’s section 5 (R1–R15). The ones this checkpoint leans on most:

• R1. Receive each Retail Partner’s manifests in the partner’s own format (SFTP file, API, EDI).
• R2. Send each Retail Partner delivery status in the partner’s own format and timing: nightly file, real-time webhook, or EDI message.
• R4. When a manifest changes after routing, coordinators see the change immediately.
• R5. The day before delivery, each Recipient gets a text and email with a delivery window and a tracking link.
• R13. Coordinators are alerted within five minutes when a truck is likely to miss a delivery window.
• R14. Finance invoices each Retail Partner daily from completed deliveries.

Constraints

• About 3,300 deliveries a working day, growing 30% a year; about eight status updates per delivery; about four photos per delivery at about 4 MB each; about 200,000 GPS readings a day.
• One Salesforce org; an integration layer between Salesforce and the partners; three Retail Partners with three integration styles.
• O1. Three times today’s volume within five years.

Your task

Use what you’ve learned in chapters 1–7:

1. The landscape (chapter 5): draw Steve Trucking’s system landscape, every arrow starting at the system that opens the connection, labeled with what moves.
2. The numbers (chapter 6): for every arrow, transactions, records and bytes per second, in the activity window, today and in three years. Which arrows are heavy in calls, and which in bytes?
3. The direction (module 2): mark every arrow a call-out, a call-in, or neither.
4. The pattern (modules 3 to 5): name Salesforce’s pattern for every arrow that touches Salesforce, from which way, what kind and whether anyone waits. Look for an arrow that’s really two flows.
5. The batch (module 5): where would you layer a batch underneath, and why?
6. The screen (module 3): which requirements are about a screen updating itself, and which pattern is that?

Write each decision as both options, then your choice: “in my professional opinion…”

Discussion

My walkthrough is Checkpoint 1: Steve Trucking, What I Would Architect. Compare your reasoning, not just your patterns. Where you chose differently, can you say what you’d gain and what you’d give up?

Design review

Hold your table of patterns. Part 2 picks a mechanism for each one and checks it against that mechanism’s limits, and the course’s last chapters test the whole design at three times today’s volume.

Exam objectives exercised

• DES-1, DES-3 (patterns and their trade-offs)
• LAND-1, LAND-2 (the system landscape)
• REQ-1, REQ-2, BIZ-1 (requirements, volumes and constraints)