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Selected:Golden PathAssumption SurfacingARID (Active Reviews for Intermediate Designs)Request for Comments
| Criterion |  Engineering Golden Path |  Decision Making Assumption Surfacing |  Architecture ARID (Active Reviews for Intermediate Designs) |  Architecture Request for Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Purposedifferent | When teams need a reliable default path for frequent use, sprawl quickly emerges without any guiding logic. Golden Path bundles the preferred path so good practice becomes easy and deviation becomes deliberate. | 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. | 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. | An RFC clarifies architecture context, options, and consequences. It structures technical context, alternatives, tradeoffs, open questions, and review feedback, and captures the result as an RFC document, reviewer comments, and a decision rationale. |
Complexitydifferent | Medium | Low | Medium | Medium |
Timedifferent | 1-3 Tage Setup, laufend | 45-90 min | 2–4 h review as a planning range; preparation and evaluation additional | 1-3 Wochen vom Draft bis zur Entscheidung |
Participantsdifferent | 2-8 | 2-8 | Designers, developers as users, and facilitation | 3-20 Reviewer |
Formatdifferent | Workshop + async | Workshop + async | Workshop + async | Async |
Outputdifferent | Golden Path Guide, Templates, Quality Checks | Assumption List, Critical Assumptions, Learning Plan | Prioritized development tasks, Jointly produced code or pseudocode, Observed difficulties and open design questions, Proposed design revisions | RFC document, Reviewer comments, Decision rationale, Follow-up ADR or tickets |
Tagsno overlap | EngineeringProductivityGovernance | AssumptionsRiskDecisionDiscovery | ArchitectureEngineeringFeedbackValidationTasks | ArchitectureDecisionAsyncGovernance |