Architecture review
Definition
A formal or semi-formal review of a proposed system design, typically covering scalability, reliability, security, cost, and alignment with technical standards, conducted before significant engineering work begins.
Architecture reviews exist because architectural decisions are expensive to reverse. A bug in a code review is a one-day fix; a fundamental architectural flaw discovered in production can cost months of rework. The architecture review is the upstream checkpoint.
Who participates: The proposing team, plus senior engineers or architects who have breadth across the system. Many organizations have a dedicated Architecture Review Board (ARB) or require review from principal/staff engineers for proposals above a certain scale or risk threshold.
What gets reviewed:
- Does the design meet the functional requirements?
- How does it scale? What are the bottlenecks at 10x load?
- What are the failure modes? How does it degrade gracefully?
- What are the security implications?
- Does it introduce new infrastructure or third-party dependencies that need evaluation?
- Is it consistent with the organization's existing architectural patterns?
- What's the data model, and does it support the access patterns?
The whiteboard: Architecture reviews are whiteboard-native. System diagrams, data flow charts, sequence diagrams, and component maps all live on whiteboards during the review session. Snap every board with BoardSnap, the AI extracts the components, connections, and decisions, providing a structured summary that goes into the architecture decision record (ADR).
Examples
- A principal engineer runs an architecture review before the team begins building a new payments service, identifying that the proposed approach would require distributed transactions and proposing a simpler design.
- An Architecture Review Board at a 200-person company requires sign-off for any proposal that introduces a new database technology or messaging system.
- A startup formalizes architecture reviews after a scaling incident reveals that the original design couldn't handle 10x traffic growth.
- A team uses the architecture review as a forcing function for writing an Architecture Decision Record, the review is the conversation; the ADR is the artifact.
Related terms
Snap a architecture review. Ship its actions.
BoardSnap turns any whiteboard, including this one, into a summary and action plan.