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Selected:Smoke TestSAAM (Software Architecture Analysis Method)A/B TestingARID (Active Reviews for Intermediate Designs)
| Criterion |  Product Discovery Smoke Test |  Architecture SAAM (Software Architecture Analysis Method) |  Growth A/B Testing |  Architecture ARID (Active Reviews for Intermediate Designs) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
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. | SAAM helps teams judge an architecture’s suitability for selected tasks and changes. It is particularly useful for examining modifiability and comparing architecture alternatives with clear reasoning. | When two variants compete, discussions quickly decide by taste rather than effect. A/B Testing checks behavior under controlled conditions and separates real improvement from chance or expectation effects. | 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. |
Complexitydifferent | Low | High | High | Medium |
Timedifferent | 1-5 Tage | Preparation, scenario analysis, and findings review; effort depends on scope | 1-4 Wochen | 2–4 h review as a planning range; preparation and evaluation additional |
Participantsdifferent | Nutzertraffic | Architecture experts and stakeholders for scenarios and weighting | 1-6 | Designers, developers as users, and facilitation |
Formatdifferent | Async | Workshop + async | Async | Workshop + async |
Outputdifferent | Interest Metrics, Conversion Signal, Learning Note | Domain functions mapped to components and connections, Quality attributes and evaluation criteria, Typical tasks and their effects on the architecture, Reasoned evaluation or comparison of alternatives | Experiment results, Decision log, Learning summary | Prioritized development tasks, Jointly produced code or pseudocode, Observed difficulties and open design questions, Proposed design revisions |
Tagsno overlap | ValidationExperimentsDemandGrowth | ArchitectureChangeAnalysisComparisonQuality | ExperimentsGrowthAnalyticsValidation | ArchitectureEngineeringFeedbackValidationTasks |