Module
Module 6 of 6Lesson 2 of 2~12 min

Exit kit and action plan

So the review does not remain a one-off exercise, this final lesson gathers the course tools and puts them on your calendar. You leave with reusable templates for every step of an architecture review and a concrete plan to build these habits into your team's day-to-day work.

Take this lesson: your first course is freeSee the full syllabus

Lesson objective

By the end of this lesson, you will have the course's templates, checklists and prompts (ten questions, quality scenario, data and dependency tables, risk register, ADR), and you will have planned how to apply them to your product over 7 and 30 days.

Topics covered

  • architecture templates
  • ADR template
  • PM action plan
  • system design prompts

Where it fits

Running the architecture review

How do you ask the team the right questions, without being an engineer, and turn them into risks and decisions?

Lessons in this module

  1. Running the architecture review of your product
  2. Exit kit and action plan (this lesson)

What you will learn in the course

This lesson is part of the course Read and challenge a technical architecture

  • Read an architecture diagram (context and container levels of the C4 model) and spot its components, flows, boundaries and gray areas.
  • Turn vague expectations ("fast", "reliable", "scalable") into measurable non-functional requirements, written as quality attribute scenarios.
  • Compare monolith, modular monolith and microservices, then synchronous calls and asynchronous processing, based on the team, the load and the consequences for the user.
  • Assess data choices (source of truth, transactions, replicas, consistency), scaling and caching, and spot the bottleneck of a user journey.
  • Assess dependencies on third-party services (composite availability, degraded mode, vendor lock-in) and a build or buy decision.
  • Frame an architecture trade-off, record it in an ADR and treat technical debt as a product decision.
  • Run an architecture review of your product or of a proposal, with ten questions, a risk register and explicit trade-offs.

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