Version: 1.0 Last Updated: 2025-11-09 Status: Draft Owner: Product & Engineering Team
SupplyBoost is an educational platform demonstrating enterprise-grade supply chain management through a distributed microservices architecture. The project serves as a learning vehicle for modern software engineering practices, cloud-native patterns, and real-world system design challenges.
Target Audience: Software engineers transitioning from monolithic applications to distributed systems.
- Educational Gap: Most learning resources focus on trivial examples (todo apps) that don't reflect real-world complexity
- Architecture Understanding: Engineers lack hands-on experience with microservices, event-driven systems, and distributed transactions
- Integration Complexity: Limited resources demonstrate how multiple business domains interact in practice
- Operational Concerns: Few examples address monitoring, resilience, and production-readiness
- Functional supply chain management system with complete user journeys
- Well-documented architecture demonstrating industry best practices
- Testable, deployable system with proper CI/CD pipelines
- Educational value through clear documentation and decision records
Build a production-quality reference implementation of supply chain management that demonstrates the full lifecycle of distributed system development, from design to deployment.
- Functional Completeness: Implement end-to-end business processes
- Technical Excellence: Demonstrate modern architecture patterns
- Educational Value: Provide learning resources through code and documentation
- Operational Maturity: Include monitoring, logging, and resilience patterns
- Building a commercially viable product for actual business use
- Supporting multi-tenancy or white-labeling
- Implementing AI/ML features (future consideration)
- Mobile native applications (web-first approach)
- Profile: Mid-level developer (2-5 years experience) seeking to understand distributed systems
- Goals: Learn microservices patterns, study real-world implementations, build portfolio project
- Needs: Clear documentation, runnable examples, architectural explanations
- Profile: DevOps engineer exploring deployment patterns
- Goals: Understand containerization, orchestration, monitoring strategies
- Needs: Infrastructure as code, deployment documentation, operational runbooks
- Profile: Fictional retail customer for demonstration purposes
- Goals: Browse products, place orders, track shipments
- Needs: Intuitive UI, responsive experience, order visibility
- Customer registers/authenticates
- Browses product catalog with search/filtering
- Adds items to shopping cart
- Proceeds to checkout with payment
- Receives order confirmation
- Tracks order status
- Receives shipment notification
- System checks inventory availability
- Reserves items for pending orders
- Updates stock levels on order completion
- Triggers reorder notifications for low stock
- Generates inventory reports
- Order service receives new order
- Payment processing and validation
- Warehouse notification for picking
- Shipment creation and carrier assignment
- Customer notification at each stage
- Accounting integration for revenue recognition
- IAM-001: User registration with email verification
- IAM-002: OAuth2/OIDC authentication via Keycloak
- IAM-003: Role-based access control (Customer, Admin, Warehouse Staff)
- IAM-004: Session management with JWT tokens
- IAM-005: Password reset and account recovery
- CAT-001: Product listing with pagination (50 items/page)
- CAT-002: Full-text search across product name, description, category
- CAT-003: Faceted filtering (category, price range, brand, availability)
- CAT-004: Product detail pages with images, specifications, reviews
- CAT-005: Category hierarchy and navigation
- CART-001: Add/remove/update cart items
- CART-002: Persistent cart across sessions (authenticated users)
- CART-003: Real-time price calculations with tax
- CART-004: Quantity validation against inventory
- CART-005: Cart abandonment tracking
- ORD-001: Order creation with multi-item support
- ORD-002: Order status tracking (Pending, Confirmed, Shipped, Delivered, Cancelled)
- ORD-003: Order history with search/filtering
- ORD-004: Order cancellation within configurable window
- ORD-005: Order modification before shipment
- INV-001: Real-time inventory tracking per SKU
- INV-002: Inventory reservation on order creation
- INV-003: Automatic stock release on order cancellation
- INV-004: Low stock alerts (configurable thresholds)
- INV-005: Inventory audit trail
- PAY-001: Integration with payment gateway (Stripe/mock)
- PAY-002: Support for credit card, debit card payments
- PAY-003: Payment retry logic for transient failures
- PAY-004: Refund processing for cancelled orders
- PAY-005: Payment audit and reconciliation
- NOT-001: Email notifications for order events
- NOT-002: SMS notifications for shipment updates (optional)
- NOT-003: In-app notifications
- NOT-004: Notification preferences management
- NOT-005: Template-based notification rendering
- ACC-001: Automatic invoice generation on order confirmation
- ACC-002: Invoice PDF generation and email delivery
- ACC-003: Revenue recognition on shipment
- ACC-004: Refund tracking and accounting
- ACC-005: Financial reporting (daily/monthly summaries)
- PERF-001: API response time p95 < 500ms for read operations
- PERF-002: API response time p95 < 1000ms for write operations
- PERF-003: System supports 100 concurrent users (initial target)
- PERF-004: Database query response time < 100ms for 95% of queries
- PERF-005: Message processing latency < 5 seconds end-to-end
- SCALE-001: Horizontal scaling of stateless microservices
- SCALE-002: Database read replicas for query distribution
- SCALE-003: Event queue handles 1000 messages/second
- SCALE-004: CDN integration for static assets
- AVAIL-001: 99% uptime target for demo environment
- AVAIL-002: Graceful degradation when non-critical services fail
- AVAIL-003: Circuit breaker pattern for inter-service calls
- AVAIL-004: Retry logic with exponential backoff
- AVAIL-005: Health check endpoints for all services
- SEC-001: HTTPS/TLS for all external communications
- SEC-002: Encrypted sensitive data at rest (PII, payment info)
- SEC-003: Input validation and sanitization
- SEC-004: SQL injection and XSS prevention
- SEC-005: Rate limiting on public APIs (100 requests/minute per IP)
- SEC-006: Audit logging for sensitive operations
- OBS-001: Centralized logging with structured JSON format
- OBS-002: Distributed tracing with correlation IDs
- OBS-003: Metrics collection (RED: Rate, Errors, Duration)
- OBS-004: Service dependency visualization
- OBS-005: Real-time alerting for critical errors
- MAINT-001: Code coverage > 70% for business logic
- MAINT-002: API documentation via OpenAPI/Swagger
- MAINT-003: Automated database migrations
- MAINT-004: Consistent code style via linters
- MAINT-005: Architecture Decision Records for major choices
- Backend: Java 17+ with Spring Boot framework
- Frontend: Vue.js 3 with TypeScript
- Message Broker: Apache Kafka for event streaming
- Search Engine: Elasticsearch for product catalog
- Identity Provider: Keycloak for authentication
- Container Runtime: Docker with Kubernetes orchestration
- Database: PostgreSQL for transactional data
- Must run on developer laptops (Docker Compose for local dev)
- Must deploy to free-tier cloud services (initial phase)
- Must support Linux and macOS development environments
- CI/CD must complete in < 10 minutes for fast feedback
- User authentication and registration functional
- Product catalog with search (minimum 20 sample products)
- Shopping cart and checkout flow
- Order creation and basic status tracking
- Email notifications for key events
- Local deployment via Docker Compose
- Basic integration test suite passing
- API documentation published
- All MVP features plus inventory management
- Payment processing integration (test mode)
- Advanced order management (cancellation, modification)
- Kubernetes deployment manifests
- Monitoring and logging infrastructure
- Load testing demonstrating performance targets
- Security audit completed
- All beta features plus accounting integration
- Production-grade monitoring and alerting
- Disaster recovery procedures documented
- Performance optimization complete
- Security hardening complete
- User acceptance testing passed
- Operational runbooks created
- Payment Gateway: Stripe API (free tier limitations)
- Email Service: SendGrid or AWS SES (rate limits)
- Cloud Infrastructure: Requires cloud account setup
- Domain Name: For production-like deployment
| Risk | Impact | Probability | Mitigation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Distributed transaction complexity | High | High | Implement saga pattern, comprehensive testing |
| Kubernetes learning curve | Medium | High | Start with Docker Compose, progressive migration |
| Event ordering issues | High | Medium | Design for idempotency, use event sourcing patterns |
| Database performance bottlenecks | Medium | Medium | Implement caching, read replicas, query optimization |
| Third-party service reliability | Low | Medium | Mock services for development, fallback strategies |
- Risk: Scope creep expanding timeline indefinitely
- Mitigation: Strict adherence to MVP feature set, parking lot for future features
- All microservices deployable independently
- < 5% error rate in production logs
- Test coverage above 70%
- Zero critical security vulnerabilities
- Comprehensive ADRs documenting all major decisions
- README enables new developer to run system in < 30 minutes
- Architecture documentation includes sequence diagrams for key flows
- At least 3 complete user journeys demonstrable
- Real-time inventory sync with physical warehouses
- Multi-currency and internationalization
- Advanced recommendation engine
- Mobile native applications
- B2B wholesale portal
- Supplier management system
- Advanced analytics and reporting dashboards
- Machine learning for demand forecasting
- SKU: Stock Keeping Unit - unique identifier for products
- Saga Pattern: Distributed transaction pattern using compensating transactions
- Circuit Breaker: Pattern preventing cascading failures in distributed systems
- Idempotency: Property where operation can be repeated without changing result
- Event Sourcing: Pattern storing state changes as sequence of events
| Version | Date | Author | Changes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1.0 | 2025-11-09 | Engineering Team | Initial comprehensive PRD |