The real cost of ignoring system design reviews
We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. Nobody bills you for neglecting system design reviews. The cost shows up somewhere else.
The right architecture for a team of three is the wrong one for a team of thirty, and vice versa. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.
Where the cost lands
- Time spent on work that should not have been necessary
- Enquiries that quietly never arrive
- An hour of review before the build saves weeks of rework
- Rework, once the problem is finally visible
Write the design down. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.
Making it stick
Invite the person who will be on call for it. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.
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
- a whiteboard photo is not a record — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.