The Discovery-to-Iteration Lifecycle Loop

An architect supports the solution across its whole life, not just at design time. The lifecycle has five named phases:

A Loop, Not a Line

The critical mental model is that the lifecycle loops: monitoring and iteration feed back into design as requirements, data, and models evolve. It is not a one-directional pipeline that terminates at handoff. This mirrors the feedback-loop discipline of stakeholder communication and the monitoring practices used elsewhere in production architecture -- the architect keeps the loop turning across all of them.

Why Each Phase Depends on the Ones Before It

• Design depends on discovery's agreed outcome and constraints
• Handoff depends on design's documentation and rationale
• Monitoring depends on handoff having included observability/eval setup
• Iteration depends on monitoring surfacing real signal, and on the stakeholder feedback loop

Common exam traps

• Treating design as "done" at handoff. Non-determinism, model updates, and data drift mean the architecture needs ongoing monitoring and iteration to stay within its SLAs. When monitoring reveals latency creeping past an agreed SLA after a data-volume increase, the correct move is to feed that finding back into iteration and re-align expectations with stakeholders -- not to do nothing because the design was signed off at handoff, disable monitoring to silence the alerts, or reach for an unrelated parameter tweak.