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Criterion
A hypothetical failure makes concrete risks, signals, and fitting mitigations visible.
Decision Making
Pre-Mortem
Design sheets and interface cards connect to jointly written pseudocode with highlighted unresolved questions.
Architecture
ARID (Active Reviews for Intermediate Designs)
Paper illustration of two considered options leading to a decision record with a marked status and visible consequences.
Architecture
Architecture Decision Record
Paper illustration for Argument Mapping
Decision Making
Argument Mapping
Purposedifferent
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.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 ADR permanently records an architecture decision with context, trade-offs, and consequence. It creates continuity for later changes because the decision path stays traceable.When statements, evidence, and counterarguments get mixed up, a debate quickly loses its structure. Argument Mapping breaks a thesis down into its reasoning and makes visible what it really rests on.
Complexitydifferent
LowMediumLowMedium
Timedifferent
20–45 min2–4 h review as a planning range; preparation and evaluation additional15-45 min1-3 h
Participantsdifferent
Small cross-functional groupDesigners, developers as users, and facilitation1-31-8
Formatdifferent
WorkshopWorkshop + asyncAsyncWorkshop + async
Outputdifferent
Risk list, Mitigation plan, Assumption logPrioritized development tasks, Jointly produced code or pseudocode, Observed difficulties and open design questions, Proposed design revisionsADR File, Decision Log, RationaleArgument Map, Evidence Gaps, Decision Rationale
Tagsno overlap
RiskDecisionFailurePlanning
ArchitectureEngineeringFeedbackValidationTasks
ArchitectureRationaleDocumentationGovernance
SensemakingDecisionRationale
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