What to ask your agency about system design reviews

The version of this that works is simpler than the version most people imagine. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on system design reviews, these questions are worth asking early.

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.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

An hour of review before the build saves weeks of rework. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

Invite the person who will be on call for it. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

In practice

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
• Write the design down — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.