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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 Trade-off Analysis.
Decision Making
Trade-off Analysis
Decision Tree method illustration showing its working structure
Decision Making
Decision Tree
Paper illustration for Constraint Analysis.
Decision Making
Constraint Analysis
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.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 an initiative stalls, the limit often lies not in the idea but in hard or soft boundary conditions. Constraint Analysis separates these limits and shows which of them can actually be shaped.
Complexitydifferent
MediumMediumMediumLow
Timedifferent
2–4 h review as a planning range; preparation and evaluation additional45-120 min30-90 min30-90 min
Participantsdifferent
Designers, developers as users, and facilitation2-81-62-8
Formatsame
Workshop + asyncWorkshop + asyncWorkshop + asyncWorkshop + async
Outputdifferent
Prioritized development tasks, Jointly produced code or pseudocode, Observed difficulties and open design questions, Proposed design revisionsTrade-off Matrix, Criteria List, Decision Rationale, Accepted DownsidesDecision Tree, Option Map, Assumption ListConstraint List, Hard/Soft Classification, Option Impact Notes, Decision Boundaries
Tagsno overlap
ArchitectureEngineeringFeedbackValidationTasks
TradeoffsDecisionCriteriaOptions
DecisionTreeOptions
ConstraintsDecisionPlanningOptions
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