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Selected:Pre-MortemARID (Active Reviews for Intermediate Designs)Request for CommentsAssumption Surfacing
| Criterion | ![]() Decision Making Pre-Mortem | ![]() Architecture ARID (Active Reviews for Intermediate Designs) | ![]() Architecture Request for Comments | ![]() Decision Making Assumption Surfacing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
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 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. | 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. |
Complexitydifferent | Low | Medium | Medium | Low |
Timedifferent | 20–45 min | 2–4 h review as a planning range; preparation and evaluation additional | 1-3 Wochen vom Draft bis zur Entscheidung | 45-90 min |
Participantsdifferent | Small cross-functional group | Designers, developers as users, and facilitation | 3-20 Reviewer | 2-8 |
Formatdifferent | Workshop | Workshop + async | 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 | RFC document, Reviewer comments, Decision rationale, Follow-up ADR or tickets | Assumption List, Critical Assumptions, Learning Plan |
Tagsno overlap | RiskDecisionFailurePlanning | ArchitectureEngineeringFeedbackValidationTasks | ArchitectureDecisionAsyncGovernance | AssumptionsRiskDecisionDiscovery |



