The Architecture Review Cadence That Catches Drift

Architecture decisions decay. The 6-month review that catches drift before it becomes incident-causing.

When and why

Architecture review cadence is six-monthly per service or domain. Frequent enough to catch drift between the doc and the system; rare enough not to become ceremony nobody attends. Off-cycle reviews trigger on major changes: new service launch, deprecation, vendor migration.

• Every six months. Standing cadence per service. Catches drift while it is still small.
• Per service or per domain. Small focused scope. Mass architecture meetings do not work; small focused reviews do.
• Triggered by major changes. Off-cycle review on new service launch, deprecation, vendor migration. The big changes deserve a fresh look.
• Named owner per review. Responsible architect explicit. Catches the “everyone-and-no-one” failure mode.

Agenda

Three sections every time: current state, open issues, future-impact scan. Predictable structure means people know what to bring; the architect spends less time framing the meeting and more time on the actual decisions.

• Current architecture. Still-right check. What has changed since last review and why?
• Open issues. Known-problems list. Plan and owner per problem.
• Future. Next-six-months impact scan. What is coming that affects this architecture?
• Published agenda. Pre-circulated outline supports preparation. Attendees arrive ready.

Output

The output is concrete: updated architecture document, action items for drift with owners and dates, decisions logged for future readers. The doc is the durable artefact; everything else flows from it.

• Updated architecture document. System-of-record refresh per review. The durable artefact.
• Action items for drift. Named owner and date per drift item. Tracked alongside other engineering work.
• Decisions logged. “We kept X because Y” records. Durable knowledge that survives engineer turnover.
• Published summary. Team-wide write-up per review. Cross-team awareness without each team reading the full doc.