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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 Decision Framing Workshop.
Decision Making
Decision Framing Workshop
Paper illustration with architecture components and concrete change tasks for comparison.
Architecture
SAAM (Software Architecture Analysis Method)
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.When a decision is poorly framed, even good answers deliver little value. A Decision Framing Workshop sharpens the problem, goal, and boundaries before the actual weighing begins.SAAM helps teams judge an architecture’s suitability for selected tasks and changes. It is particularly useful for examining modifiability and comparing architecture alternatives with clear reasoning.
Complexitydifferent
MediumMediumHigh
Timedifferent
2–4 h review as a planning range; preparation and evaluation additional60-120 minPreparation, scenario analysis, and findings review; effort depends on scope
Participantsdifferent
Designers, developers as users, and facilitation4-10Architecture experts and stakeholders for scenarios and weighting
Formatdifferent
Workshop + asyncWorkshopWorkshop + async
Outputdifferent
Prioritized development tasks, Jointly produced code or pseudocode, Observed difficulties and open design questions, Proposed design revisionsDecision Frame, Decision Question, Criteria List, Evidence PlanDomain functions mapped to components and connections, Quality attributes and evaluation criteria, Typical tasks and their effects on the architecture, Reasoned evaluation or comparison of alternatives
Tagsno overlap
ArchitectureEngineeringFeedbackValidationTasks
Decision framingAlignmentCriteriaOptions
ArchitectureChangeAnalysisComparisonQuality
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Methods with strong topical overlap with the current selection, not yet in the comparison.

Paper illustration for Option Framing.
Decision Making
Option Framing
Paper illustration for 3-Circle Venn Diagram
Facilitation
3-Circle Venn Diagram
Architecture Inception Canvas method illustration showing its working structure
Architecture
Architecture Inception Canvas
Paper illustration: scenarios and architectural decisions are connected to identified risks.
Architecture
ATAM (Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method)