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| Criterion |  Decision Making Pre-Mortem |  Decision Making Trade-off Analysis |  Architecture Request for Comments |  Architecture Architecture Decision Record |
|---|---|---|---|---|
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. | 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. | 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. | 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. |
Complexitydifferent | Low | Medium | Medium | Low |
Timedifferent | 20–45 min | 45-120 min | 1-3 Wochen vom Draft bis zur Entscheidung | 15-45 min |
Participantsdifferent | Small cross-functional group | 2-8 | 3-20 Reviewer | 1-3 |
Formatdifferent | Workshop | Workshop + async | Async | Async |
Outputdifferent | Risk list, Mitigation plan, Assumption log | Trade-off Matrix, Criteria List, Decision Rationale, Accepted Downsides | RFC document, Reviewer comments, Decision rationale, Follow-up ADR or tickets | ADR File, Decision Log, Rationale |
Tagsno overlap | RiskDecisionFailurePlanning | TradeoffsDecisionCriteriaOptions | ArchitectureDecisionAsyncGovernance | ArchitectureRationaleDocumentationGovernance |