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Selected:ARID (Active Reviews for Intermediate Designs)Trade-off AnalysisAssumption MappingAssumption Surfacing
| Criterion |  Architecture ARID (Active Reviews for Intermediate Designs) |  Decision Making Trade-off Analysis |  Product Discovery Assumption Mapping |  Decision Making Assumption Surfacing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
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. | With limited resources, quality, speed, cost, and risk almost always compete with each other. Trade-off Analysis makes these tensions explicit and prevents decisions from producing hidden side effects. | When assumptions still sit unordered in the room, it weighs uncertainty against leverage. It makes visible which hypotheses should be checked first. | Plans often contain assumptions that were never openly stated and remain dangerous precisely because of that. Assumption Surfacing makes these silent premises visible and prioritizes which of them carry the initiative or could sink it. |
Complexitydifferent | Medium | Medium | Medium | Low |
Timedifferent | 2–4 h review as a planning range; preparation and evaluation additional | 45-120 min | 45-60 min | 45-90 min |
Participantsdifferent | Designers, developers as users, and facilitation | 2-8 | 2-8 | 2-8 |
Formatsame | Workshop + async | Workshop + async | Workshop + async | Workshop + async |
Outputdifferent | Prioritized development tasks, Jointly produced code or pseudocode, Observed difficulties and open design questions, Proposed design revisions | Trade-off Matrix, Criteria List, Decision Rationale, Accepted Downsides | Assumption map, Test backlog, Risk ranking | Assumption List, Critical Assumptions, Learning Plan |
Tagsno overlap | ArchitectureEngineeringFeedbackValidationTasks | TradeoffsDecisionCriteriaOptions | AssumptionsRiskExperimentsValidation | AssumptionsRiskDecisionDiscovery |