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| Criterion | ![]() Engineering Fault Isolation | ![]() Product Discovery Pretotyping | ![]() Product Discovery Smoke Test | ![]() Architecture ARID (Active Reviews for Intermediate Designs) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Purposedifferent | In technical failures, the visible symptom often gets mixed up with the actual cause. Fault Isolation narrows the fault space and progressively reduces which part of the system is truly affected. | Pretotyping clarifies whether a customer problem and solution idea create enough real demand. It separates problem, assumption, solution, and evidence, and captures the result as a pretotyping sketch, test setup, and conversion data. | When demand only needs to be roughly verified, it tests interest with minimal effort. It measures whether people would take a next step at all. | 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. |
Complexitydifferent | Medium | Low | Low | Medium |
Timedifferent | 30-180 min | Stunden bis wenige Tage | 1-5 Tage | 2–4 h review as a planning range; preparation and evaluation additional |
Participantsdifferent | 1-6 | 1-4 | Nutzertraffic | Designers, developers as users, and facilitation |
Formatdifferent | Workshop + async | Workshop + async | Async | Workshop + async |
Outputdifferent | Fault Isolation Map, Test Log, Excluded Hypotheses, Narrowed Fault Area | Pretotyping sketch, Test setup, Conversion data, Go or no-go decision | Interest Metrics, Conversion Signal, Learning Note | Prioritized development tasks, Jointly produced code or pseudocode, Observed difficulties and open design questions, Proposed design revisions |
Tagsno overlap | TroubleshootingDiagnosisEngineering | ValidationDemandMVP | ValidationExperimentsDemandGrowth | ArchitectureEngineeringFeedbackValidationTasks |



