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.