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| Criterion |  Decision Making Trade-off Analysis |  Architecture ARID (Active Reviews for Intermediate Designs) |  Decision Making Decision Tree |
|---|---|---|---|
Purposedifferent | 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. | 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. | For decisions with follow-on paths and dependencies, a linear comparison is often not enough. A Decision Tree shows how options branch under conditions and which consequences hang on each branch. |
Complexitysame | Medium | Medium | Medium |
Timedifferent | 45-120 min | 2–4 h review as a planning range; preparation and evaluation additional | 30-90 min |
Participantsdifferent | 2-8 | Designers, developers as users, and facilitation | 1-6 |
Formatsame | Workshop + async | Workshop + async | Workshop + async |
Outputdifferent | Trade-off Matrix, Criteria List, Decision Rationale, Accepted Downsides | Prioritized development tasks, Jointly produced code or pseudocode, Observed difficulties and open design questions, Proposed design revisions | Decision Tree, Option Map, Assumption List |
Tagsno overlap | TradeoffsDecisionCriteriaOptions | ArchitectureEngineeringFeedbackValidationTasks | DecisionTreeOptions |
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