Reflection Questions

These questions are most useful when answered in writing before a team discussion, or when used as a retrospective prompt after a decision has been made.

1. Pull the last three significant architecture decisions your team made. Do any of them have named tradeoffs? If not, what are the tradeoffs?
2. When did a technical disagreement in your organisation last resolve by naming the tradeoff rather than arguing the merits? What changed?
3. Where in your system would an engineer discover an implicit guarantee that was never documented?
4. If you had to explain your team’s most consequential architecture decision to a board member in two sentences, what is the tradeoff you would name?

Design: Audit the last six months of architecture decisions in your organisation. For each significant decision: write the ADR that should have been written — naming the AT tradeoff accepted, the alternative rejected and why, and the condition under which the decision should be revisited. Identify which decisions have no owner recorded and assign one.