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Criterion
Design sheets and interface cards connect to jointly written pseudocode with highlighted unresolved questions.
Architecture
ARID (Active Reviews for Intermediate Designs)
Paper illustration for Current Reality Tree
Systems Thinking
Current Reality Tree
Paper illustration of a calm four-quadrant Assumption Map with hypothesis cards and emphasis on important assumptions with little evidence.
Product Discovery
Assumption Mapping
Purposedifferent
ARID examines how well developers can work with a technical design. It focuses on a part of the system that can still be revised, between the architecture overview and the detailed specification.A Current Reality Tree condenses many symptoms into a few causal chains. The method makes visible which core problems drive several negative effects at once.When assumptions still sit unordered in the room, it weighs uncertainty against leverage. It makes visible which hypotheses should be checked first.
Complexitydifferent
MediumHighMedium
Timedifferent
2–4 h review as a planning range; preparation and evaluation additional2-6 h45-60 min
Participantsdifferent
Designers, developers as users, and facilitation3-82-8
Formatdifferent
Workshop + asyncWorkshopWorkshop + async
Outputdifferent
Prioritized development tasks, Jointly produced code or pseudocode, Observed difficulties and open design questions, Proposed design revisionsCurrent Reality Tree, Core Problems, Intervention IdeasAssumption map, Test backlog, Risk ranking
Tagsno overlap
ArchitectureEngineeringFeedbackValidationTasks
Systems thinkingRoot causeConstraintsCausality
AssumptionsRiskExperimentsValidation
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Methods with strong topical overlap with the current selection, not yet in the comparison.

Causal Loop Diagram workspace showing the question, observations, and next decision.
Systems Thinking
Causal Loop Diagram
Paper illustration for Risk Storming.
Architecture
Risk Storming
Paper illustration of Riskiest Assumption Test with a method-specific labelled workspace.
Product Discovery
Riskiest Assumption Test
Paper illustration for Theory of Constraints Thinking Process.
Systems Thinking
Theory of Constraints Thinking Process