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| Criterion |  Decision Making Pre-Mortem |  Architecture ARID (Active Reviews for Intermediate Designs) |  Decision Making Decision Matrix |  Decision Making Trade-off Analysis |
|---|---|---|---|---|
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. | When several options collide with several criteria, comparison quickly becomes subjective. A Decision Matrix makes the trade-off visible and brings weighting, criteria, and options into a shared logic. | 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. |
Complexitydifferent | Low | Medium | Medium | Medium |
Timedifferent | 20–45 min | 2–4 h review as a planning range; preparation and evaluation additional | 45-90 min | 45-120 min |
Participantsdifferent | Small cross-functional group | Designers, developers as users, and facilitation | 2-8 | 2-8 |
Formatdifferent | Workshop | Workshop + async | Workshop + async | Workshop + async |
Outputdifferent | Risk list, Mitigation plan, Assumption log | Prioritized development tasks, Jointly produced code or pseudocode, Observed difficulties and open design questions, Proposed design revisions | Decision Matrix, Scoring Rationale, Selected Option | Trade-off Matrix, Criteria List, Decision Rationale, Accepted Downsides |
Tagsno overlap | RiskDecisionFailurePlanning | ArchitectureEngineeringFeedbackValidationTasks | DecisionCriteriaScoringTradeoffs | TradeoffsDecisionCriteriaOptions |