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| Criterion |  Decision Making Trade-off Analysis |  Architecture Views and Beyond |  Architecture Request for Comments |  Architecture arc42 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
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. | Views and Beyond organizes architecture into several views so no single diagram has to do everything at once. This makes it possible to choose the representation that fits the stakeholder's question. | 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. | arc42 structures architecture knowledge so teams can document system, decisions, and risks consistently. The template builds a living understanding of the architecture instead of scattered notes. |
Complexitydifferent | Medium | Medium | Medium | Low |
Timedifferent | 45-120 min | 1-3 Tage | 1-3 Wochen vom Draft bis zur Entscheidung | 1-2 Tage |
Participantsdifferent | 2-8 | 1-4 | 3-20 Reviewer | 1-4 |
Formatdifferent | Workshop + async | Workshop + async | Async | Workshop + async |
Outputdifferent | Trade-off Matrix, Criteria List, Decision Rationale, Accepted Downsides | Architecture Views, Cross-view Notes, Rationale | RFC document, Reviewer comments, Decision rationale, Follow-up ADR or tickets | Architecture Document, Context View, Runtime View, Deployment View |
Tagsno overlap | TradeoffsDecisionCriteriaOptions | DocumentationStakeholdersArchitecture | ArchitectureDecisionAsyncGovernance | ArchitectureDocumentationCommunication |