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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 matrix with six colored hat cards for information, feeling, value, caution, ideas and process control.
Facilitation
Six Thinking Hats
Decision Tree method illustration showing its working structure
Decision Making
Decision Tree
Paper illustration of the Lightning Decision Jam working structure.
Facilitation
Decision Jam
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 topic gets stuck too quickly in the same thinking mode, Six Thinking Hats deliberately separates the perspectives. This means facts, risks, creativity, and emotional signals get worked through one after another instead of mixed together.For decisions with follow-on paths and dependencies, a linear comparison is often not enough. A Decision Tree shows how options branch under conditions and which consequences hang on each branch.When a decision is stuck, Decision Jam loosens the knot through structured separation of problem, idea, and selection. The format creates movement without jumping prematurely at the first seemingly elegant answer.
Complexitydifferent
MediumMediumMediumLow
Timedifferent
2–4 h review as a planning range; preparation and evaluation additional45-90 min30-90 min60-90 min
Participantsdifferent
Designers, developers as users, and facilitation4-121-64-10
Formatdifferent
Workshop + asyncWorkshopWorkshop + asyncWorkshop
Outputdifferent
Prioritized development tasks, Jointly produced code or pseudocode, Observed difficulties and open design questions, Proposed design revisionsPerspective Notes, Decision Inputs, Action ItemsDecision Tree, Option Map, Assumption ListProblem Cluster, Prioritized Challenge, Experiment
Tagsno overlap
ArchitectureEngineeringFeedbackValidationTasks
FacilitationOptionsDecision
DecisionTreeOptions
FacilitationDecisionProblem solvingWorkshop
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