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Selected:ARID (Active Reviews for Intermediate Designs)Starfish RetrospectiveSailboat RetrospectiveAssumption Mapping
| Criterion | ![]() Architecture ARID (Active Reviews for Intermediate Designs) | ![]() Agile Starfish Retrospective | ![]() Agile Sailboat Retrospective | ![]() 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. | When improvement options need to be sorted more finely than just start and stop, it brings observations into clear kinds of action. This makes visible what should be done more, less, newly, or continued. | When a team wants to read momentum, brakes, and risks together, it offers an easily understandable picture of the situation. It makes drive, obstacles, and headwind visible in the same picture. | When assumptions still sit unordered in the room, it weighs uncertainty against leverage. It makes visible which hypotheses should be checked first. |
Complexitydifferent | Medium | Low | Low | Medium |
Timedifferent | 2–4 h review as a planning range; preparation and evaluation additional | 45-90 min | 45-90 min | 45-60 min |
Participantsdifferent | Designers, developers as users, and facilitation | 4-12 | 4-12 | 2-8 |
Formatdifferent | Workshop + async | Workshop | Workshop | Workshop + async |
Outputdifferent | Prioritized development tasks, Jointly produced code or pseudocode, Observed difficulties and open design questions, Proposed design revisions | Starfish Board, Practice Changes, Experiments | Sailboat Board, Risks, Improvement Actions | Assumption map, Test backlog, Risk ranking |
Tagsno overlap | ArchitectureEngineeringFeedbackValidationTasks | RetrospectiveImprovementExperimentsTeam | RetrospectiveTeamImprovement | AssumptionsRiskExperimentsValidation |



