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

Every 6 months. Frequent enough to catch drift; rare enough not to be ceremony.

Per service or per domain. Mass meetings do not work; small focused reviews do.

Triggered by any major change too. New service launch, deprecation, vendor migration.

Agenda

Current architecture: still right? What has changed since last review?

Open issues: known problems with the architecture. What is the plan?

Future: what is coming in the next 6 months that affects this architecture?

Output

Updated architecture document. The system of record.

Action items for any drift identified.

Decisions logged: 'we decided to keep X because Y' is durable knowledge.