What are the most important questions to ask during an architecture review?

Understanding the architectural requirements, design decisions, and scalability/performance considerations are crucial. Additionally, evaluating security measures, maintainability, and integration with other systems are important aspects. Compliance with standards and regulations should also be assessed. By addressing these questions within the context of the review's objectives, a comprehensive assessment of the architecture can be achieved. If not done in carefully one might end up with functional gaps, overkill solutions or architecture difficult to maintain or expand if required.

Every software has an architecture, be it intentional and purposeful, or an ad-hoc one. The purpose of the reviews is to align such software and its architecture to the desired business needs. For a greater impact, both business and technical teams should be involved.

We need to understand the goals and objectives of the architecture review and we need ensure team is aligned with the goals and is able to meet the purpose and expectations. We need to define the scope, review the goals, identify the risks as far as the goals are concerned and need to come up with mitigation plans.

We need to understand the actual customer requirement as per their business application needs. Start review the SOW and architecture. Analysis the services provided and SLA Cross check the flow diagram

Goals and Scope Clarification: Understand the main objectives and expectations of the architecture review. Define criteria and metrics for evaluation. Boundaries and Assumptions: Identify the boundaries and assumptions of the review to ensure a clear understanding among participants. Alignment with Objectives: Assess how well the architecture aligns with the overall goals and objectives of the project or organization. Compliance and Standards: Evaluate whether the architecture adheres to industry standards, best practices, and regulatory requirements. Scalability and Performance: Assess the scalability and performance of the architecture to handle current and future demands.

Perfect architectures exist only in ideal world, in real world finding your own subjective perfect is necessary . Let’s say , you are building a solution to be used by internal team with not a very large user base. Architecting that solution should always revolve around performance rather than scalability as in real use case your solution is never to be used at large scale. These trade offs are necessary to be predicted and decided in the architecting and solutioning phase.

In computer science everything has a trade-off, so when reviewing an architecture, we should be able to speak towards why the current trade-offs were chosen. Ideally the reasons are bound to well-defined business need, or known use-cases for the system. For example, if it's known that reads will occur 100X more frequently than writes, then a system that trades off write performance for read performance may make sense.

Trade offs are important, we have to know how we got the system being shown/presented. Decisions were made and having the proof and support for these decisions helps solidify the end system.

Architectural decisions involve trade-offs like performance vs. scalability, reliability vs. cost, and security vs. usability. These choices shape the system's quality and suitability. Balancing flexibility with complexity, maintaining existing systems while innovating, and deciding between centralization and decentralization are key considerations. Trade-offs between monolithic and microservices architecture, data consistency, and eventual consistency in distributed systems are also crucial. Additionally, choices regarding energy efficiency, build vs. buy decisions, and long-term strategic goals impact architectural direction.

Understanding the key architectural decisions and trade-offs is critical during a review as they form the foundation of the entire architecture. These decisions reveal the thought process behind the design and highlight the areas where compromises were made. By examining these decisions, you can gain valuable insights into the architecture's strengths, weaknesses, and potential risks.

Understanding how the architecture aligns with stakeholder requirements and expectations is crucial in an architecture review. Key questions include how the architecture addresses functional and non-functional requirements, and how these are validated. Assessing alignment with business goals, user needs, and quality attributes is essential. Additionally, identifying any mismatches or conflicts among requirements aids in ensuring comprehensive coverage and satisfaction of stakeholder expectations.

Understanding the Design: This involves grasping the problem the architecture solves, the reasoning behind choices, and how it aligns with project needs. Evaluating the Architecture: This focuses on scalability, security, maintainability, and potential risks. Communication and Collaboration: Ensuring clear communication of the design, exploring alternatives, and defining next steps are crucial.

How does the architecture handle change and uncertainty? Software systems operate in dynamic and uncertain environments, where changes and new challenges can arise at any time. These changes can affect the requirements, expectations, functionality, performance, or security of the system. Therefore, it is important to ask how the architecture handles change and uncertainty, and how it adapts and evolves over time. These questions can help assess the flexibility, modularity, extensibility, and resilience of the architecture, as well as its ability to cope with variability, complexity, and unpredictability.

Adapts to new requirements: Can the architecture accommodate evolving functionalities or user needs without major overhauls? Integrates with future technologies: Is the design flexible enough to seamlessly integrate emerging technologies or unforeseen advancements? Maintains performance under pressure: Can the architecture handle increased loads, data, or usage without compromising stability or responsiveness? Evolves gracefully: Does the design allow for future iterations and enhancements without causing significant disruption or hindering progress?

If you are designing a custom architecture from scratch, consider the learning curve to the rest of the team. Established patterns are well tested, proven and documented. Therefore, even if your architecture looks amazing for your particular needs, you still have to take the team and how they will adapt to it into consideration. It is probably one of the most important aspects.

Understanding how the architecture is communicated and documented is crucial for effective collaboration and understanding among stakeholders. Questions regarding the tools, techniques, and standards utilized shed light on the clarity, consistency, and completeness of the documentation. Evaluating the documentation's usefulness and usability for different stakeholders ensures effective communication and facilitates better decision-making processes.

Communication channels: How is the architecture explained to developers, testers, managers, clients, and users? Are there tailored presentations, diagrams, or specific communication strategies for each group? Documentation format & tools: What tools and formats are used to document the architecture? Are there clear diagrams, textual descriptions, or interactive models? Do these formats align with the audiences' needs and technical expertise? Documentation standards & consistency: Are there defined standards for documenting the architecture? Is the information consistent, complete, and easy to understand for the intended audience?

Implementation fidelity: Does the actual implementation accurately reflect the intended design? Testing effectiveness: Are the tests comprehensive enough to identify potential issues and ensure the architecture functions as envisioned? Learning from experience: What challenges were encountered, and how can they be addressed in future projects to improve development and testing processes?

Just as blueprints are used to design buildings, bridges, and various structures, software architecture serves to organize and conceptualize a system. So, we need to discuss about: 1. How does this architecture solve the project requirements 2. The scale of the system it can handle 3. No system is perfect, what are the potential risks and trade-offs of this architecture? 4. How much dependency is there on other services (especially external and 3rd party)? 5. Are there any compliance or regulatory considerations like GDPR compliance, etc?

Something else to consider are risks and opportunities and budget. Risk asks opportunities associated with the architecture could drive major changes internally with the task and external with the customer. Budget will drive decisions shot direction and scope/MVP.