Making and recording decisions

someone asked whether this needed a written decision, and the answer was whether it would be expensive to change later.

Architectural significance

you asked why the queue was chosen and someone found a one-page file in the repository from 2023.

Architecture decision record

you wrote up the plan and left it open for a week so people could argue in the margins before you built anything.

Request for comments

you presented the design and spent forty minutes on a question you had not thought to ask yourself.

Design review

before starting, everyone wrote down why this will have failed in six months, and two of the reasons were the same.

Pre-mortem

you spent two days finding out whether the library could do it at all, and threw the code away.

Spike

you demoed the working prototype and someone asked when it could go live, which was never the plan.

Proof of concept

you costed six weeks to build it and nobody costed the years of owning it afterwards.

Build versus buy

the third team this year proposed the same database and nobody could say whether it was already rejected.

Technology radar

you left the storage choice open until the access patterns were real, and then it was obvious.

Last responsible moment

the meeting spent five minutes on the data retention policy and thirty-five on the button label.

Bikeshedding

the room had agreed until the director said what they preferred, and then everyone had a new opinion.

HiPPO

you argued hard against it, lost, and then did the work properly instead of relitigating in every standup.

Disagree and commit

you argued a position firmly, someone produced a number, and you changed your mind in the same meeting.

Strong opinions, weakly held

two teams had been stuck for three weeks and it took one meeting with someone who owned both.

Escalation