A practical checklist for system design reviews

This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. Run through this the next time system design reviews comes up.

Architecture is the set of decisions that are expensive to reverse, which is the only reason they deserve the name. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

The checklist

• An hour of review before the build saves weeks of rework
• Write the design down
• a whiteboard photo is not a record
• Invite the person who will be on call for it
• Someone is named as the owner
• There is a date to review it again

What is actually at stake

An hour of review before the build saves weeks of rework. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

The short version

Most systems fail at the seams rather than inside any one component. Three things worth confirming about system design reviews before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Invite the person who will be on call for it — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.