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| Criterion |  Decision Making Assumption Surfacing |  Operations ALPEN Method |  Architecture ARID (Active Reviews for Intermediate Designs) |  Decision Making Pre-Mortem |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Purposedifferent | 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. | With an overloaded day full of too many tasks, a realistic picture of the day emerges. The method connects estimating, deciding, and buffer thinking so planning fits available energy and time. | 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. | In early initiatives with many uncertainties, planning quickly turns too optimistic. A pre-mortem makes the expected failure visible in advance and sharpens the view of causes, gaps, and countermeasures. |
Complexitydifferent | Low | Low | Medium | Low |
Timedifferent | 45-90 min | 10-20 min daily | 2–4 h review as a planning range; preparation and evaluation additional | 20–45 min |
Participantsdifferent | 2-8 | 1 | Designers, developers as users, and facilitation | Small cross-functional group |
Formatdifferent | Workshop + async | Async | Workshop + async | Workshop |
Outputdifferent | Assumption List, Critical Assumptions, Learning Plan | Daily Plan, Time Estimates, Review Notes | Prioritized development tasks, Jointly produced code or pseudocode, Observed difficulties and open design questions, Proposed design revisions | Risk list, Mitigation plan, Assumption log |
Tagsno overlap | AssumptionsRiskDecisionDiscovery | PlanningTime managementProductivityOperations | ArchitectureEngineeringFeedbackValidationTasks | RiskDecisionFailurePlanning |