Prepare for an architecture review by defining the decision or feedback you need, the system and change in scope, and the concerns reviewers must assess. Then give them a concise packet linking goals and requirements to the proposed design, alternatives, trade-offs, risks, and evidence. Close the review with a recorded outcome and owned follow-up actions.
What should an architecture review accomplish?
“Architecture review” can mean a conformance check, a quality assessment, improvement feedback, shared understanding, or focused scrutiny of feasibility and risk. Set the objective before assembling materials: the project stage and the concern under review determine what evidence is useful. The Software Engineering Institute’s structured approach to reviewing architecture documentation discusses stakeholder concerns, quality, feasibility, risks, and critical scenarios; it is guidance, not a universal certification scheme.
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Write a short review contract that states:
- Purpose: What should the review establish or improve?
- Boundary: Which system, interfaces, and proposed changes are in scope, and what is excluded?
- Stage and constraints: Where is the project, what assumptions or delivery limits matter, and when is a decision needed?
- Reviewers: Which technical, product, security, operations, data, or affected-team perspectives are needed for the concerns in scope?
- Requested outcome: Is the group being asked to approve, request rework, reject with reasons, or offer advice without making a decision?
Make the review question specific enough that participants can prepare. For example: “Does this proposed data-store change meet the recovery and access requirements, and is the migration plan acceptable?”
What belongs in the review packet?
Scale the packet to the change’s risk and complexity. It should let reviewers understand the proposal and its rationale without depending on undocumented conversation. There is no single required set of diagrams: include the views that explain the concerns being reviewed.
#1 Best Overall
Problem, context, and requirements
- Describe the problem, relevant business goals, system context, assumptions, constraints, and prior decisions.
- List the functional requirements and the important quality requirements, such as performance, availability, security, or scalability. Use measurable targets only when the project has established them.
- Show critical user journeys or scenarios that make the requirements concrete. Google Cloud’s architecture decision record guidance includes requirements and critical user journeys in its example outline.
Architecture views
Choose diagrams and descriptions that clarify the system boundary, component responsibilities, dependencies, interfaces, data flows, and deployment or runtime context as relevant. Explain unfamiliar terms and identify which parts are existing and which are proposed; a diagram without that distinction can make the scope harder to assess.
Options, recommendation, and trade-offs
Present meaningful alternatives, including the status quo when it is a real option. State the decision drivers, recommend an option, explain why it fits the requirements, and say why relevant alternatives were set aside. Avoid presenting a technology choice as self-justifying. Compare options only on criteria that matter to the stated review goals:
Rank #2
- Fit with business goals, user journeys, and functional requirements.
- Quality attributes and any established targets.
- Operational ownership, team skills, observability, resilience, recovery, and failure impact.
- Dependencies, interfaces, integration and migration effort, and reversibility.
- Cost and delivery constraints, with assumptions visible.
- Risks, strength of available evidence, and consequences of choosing or rejecting each option.
These are prompts, not a universal weighted scoring formula. If a cost, target, or risk has not been established, label it as unknown or an assumption rather than supplying false precision.
Consequences, risks, and evidence
Explain expected benefits and costs, operational effects, failure modes, security and resilience concerns, dependencies, and migration or rollback implications where they apply. Link relevant tests, prototypes, threat or risk analysis, cost assumptions, standards, and earlier decisions. Mark evidence gaps and distinguish a verified result from an expectation. AWS identifies areas such as security, availability, fault tolerance, dependencies, and interfaces as significant decision topics in its architectural decision record process.
Rank #3
Decision record
Include a concise architectural decision record (ADR), or prepare one as the review outcome. AWS states that an ADR should cover the decision’s context, the decision itself, and its consequences for the project and deliverables. Add the owner, status, date, version, and stakeholders when useful. Google’s outline also calls attention to requirements, options, the decision, and the reasons for it.
How can you check the packet before sending it?
Read it from the perspective of someone who was not part of the design conversation. Can that reviewer identify who is affected, what concern is being assessed, what evidence supports the proposal, and what remains uncertain? The SEI approach recommends examining architecture documentation for stakeholder roles and concerns, how the architecture addresses them, and whether relevant quality, feasibility, risk, and scenario questions can be answered. Missing answers are a reason to improve the documentation or explicitly bring the gap to the review.
Rank #4
For reference-architecture work in a public-sector setting, the DGOV DTT contributing guide offers additional prompts: applicability and non-goals, prerequisites and simpler alternatives, dependencies, ownership and cost, resilience and recovery, migration, rollback, exit, and testable acceptance checks. It is a specific guide, not a universal standard.
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- Send the packet with the question. Give reviewers time to read and comment before the meeting. AWS suggests an average dedicated reading slot of 10 to 15 minutes at the start of an ADR review meeting; this is AWS process guidance, not a universal meeting rule.
- Open by restating the contract. Confirm scope, objective, requested outcome, decision deadline, and relevant constraints. Clarify whether the proposal is for a decision or for advice.
- Discuss comments against requirements and evidence. Separate factual corrections, missing information, risks, and differences in priorities. Record dissent and unresolved issues rather than treating silence as agreement.
- State the outcome plainly. Record whether the proposal is accepted, needs rework, is rejected with rationale, or remains advice without a decision.
- Assign follow-up work. For every action, record an owner and due date. If a decision remains proposed, specify what must change or be demonstrated and whether the group needs to reconvene.
AWS describes a review flow in which participants read individually, leave comments, discuss them, and then accept, request rework, or reject the proposal. For rework, its guidance keeps the ADR proposed and assigns actions.
How should you preserve and update the decision?
Keep accepted ADRs where the people who build, change, or operate the system can find them. Google recommends storing records near relevant code or in an accessible central location. Microsoft’s guidance on maintaining an architecture decision record advises keeping the decision log with workload documentation and readily available.
When an accepted decision changes, preserve the history and explain why. AWS recommends creating a new ADR that supersedes the prior record after approval; Google likewise recommends documenting the previous decision and the reason for the change. Do not silently rewrite the original rationale.
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