Getting started with system design reviews
It comes up on almost every project, usually later than it should. A short on-ramp to system design reviews for teams who have not touched it before.
Architecture is the set of decisions that are expensive to reverse, which is the only reason they deserve the name. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.
What it costs to ignore
An hour of review before the build saves weeks of rework. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.
Your first week
- Find out what is already in place
- Write the design down
- Change one thing and measure it
Invite the person who will be on call for it. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.
How to tell if yours is fine
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
Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.