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Selected:Smoke TestArchitecture Decision RecordARID (Active Reviews for Intermediate Designs)Assumption Mapping
| Criterion |  Product Discovery Smoke Test |  Architecture Architecture Decision Record |  Architecture ARID (Active Reviews for Intermediate Designs) |  Product Discovery Assumption Mapping |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Purposedifferent | When demand only needs to be roughly verified, it tests interest with minimal effort. It measures whether people would take a next step at all. | 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. | 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 assumptions still sit unordered in the room, it weighs uncertainty against leverage. It makes visible which hypotheses should be checked first. |
Complexitydifferent | Low | Low | Medium | Medium |
Timedifferent | 1-5 Tage | 15-45 min | 2–4 h review as a planning range; preparation and evaluation additional | 45-60 min |
Participantsdifferent | Nutzertraffic | 1-3 | Designers, developers as users, and facilitation | 2-8 |
Formatdifferent | Async | Async | Workshop + async | Workshop + async |
Outputdifferent | Interest Metrics, Conversion Signal, Learning Note | ADR File, Decision Log, Rationale | Prioritized development tasks, Jointly produced code or pseudocode, Observed difficulties and open design questions, Proposed design revisions | Assumption map, Test backlog, Risk ranking |
Tagsno overlap | ValidationExperimentsDemandGrowth | ArchitectureRationaleDocumentationGovernance | ArchitectureEngineeringFeedbackValidationTasks | AssumptionsRiskExperimentsValidation |