This class follows the exam guide. So whenever you see a slide like this, a blue column contains items directly from the exam guide.and the white column contains tips and advice directly relevant to each outlined item. You can read through these yourself. I'm going to highlight and discuss one or two of these per slide. When we speak about business requirements, we're asking the question," What are the customer's needs and expectations?" Questions on the exam are realistic, so on a job, these discussions would likely be with a business stakeholder, and you'd need to be prepared to answer these questions and their concerns. You'll notice that the first and last items in the list have to do with determining the criteria for success and deciding how to measure that. It's very important to be explicit about exactly what you're trying to achieve. These items are often stated qualitatively at the beginning and are measurable and quantitative at the end. It's extremely difficult to optimize for success criteria and minimize cost at the same time. For this reason, it's recommended that you divide the activity into function first and cost optimization second. Another suggestion is to keep existing systems working in parallel for a period of time and verify that the new system is behaving as expected. Be on the lookout for these slides, with a blue column and a white column. They're intended to explicate for you what you see on the exam guide and how to prepare. Identify the context in which the solution is being employed, think about what the business is trying to accomplish. That will help distinguish between solutions that might seem equally correct. There are no universal remedies for all situations. Different design patterns have their best uses and their limitations. In every design, there will always be issues that need to be considered. For the exam, you need to know not only design patterns but their context of use and especially what circumstances to apply one design instead of another. What's the priority or the blend of priorities? Good, fast, inexpensive? How will these priorities be measured? What are the measures of time, budget or qualities? How will you know if your design meets requirement if you can describe them and measure them in some way? One way to think about these decisions is to consider whether to build a solution from scratch yourself, purchase solution off the self or from a vendor, or customize existing products and services or trade off speed of implementation for perhaps fewer or more general features. If you build it yourself, you get absolute control over what the solution does and how it works. If you go to the experts who already have handled similar problems and have experienced creating and implementing similar solutions, it's often the fastest way to get the matter resolved. Adapting what you already have, which might be partially depreciated or already paid for is often fast, but you'll probably compromise on features. A great example of this is with our machine learning products. We have pre-trained models, like Cloud Vision API and Natural Language API, which are fast, because you can just grab them and use them. We have Cloud ML Engine and TensorFlow, which allow you to take complete control, and we have Cloud Auto ML, which allows you to customize and add to a pre-trained model.
