architecture

System design pattern selection requires evaluating your team size, expected scale, timeline, and domain complexity. Comparing a monolith versus microservices involves analyzing trade-offs like operational impact and maintainability to avoid over-engineered solutions. You must gather these constraint details before committing to an architecture.

An Architecture Decision Record (ADR) documents the rationale, alternatives, and consequences behind significant technical choices so reasoning remains traceable for future teams. You need ADR guidance when making major pattern selections or trade-off decisions that impact system maintainability and scalability.

Architecture trade-off analysis evaluates alternatives, risks, consequences, and migration paths based on real requirements. Instead of defaulting to complex patterns, you compare options against scale, team fit, and domain constraints to produce defensible recommendations that balance maintainability and operational impact.

Requirements discovery applies to SaaS, enterprise, and MVP systems by gathering scale, team, timeline, and domain complexity details before choosing a design. It evaluates specific constraints to determine whether event-driven, DDD, repository, or API patterns suit your operational and scaling needs.

Documenting system design decisions involves capturing requirements, comparing architectural patterns, and recording the trade-off rationale in an ADR. This ensures a startup evaluating whether to stay with a modular monolith or split into services maintains traceable reasoning for future evolution and scaling.

You should avoid microservices when requirements discovery indicates low domain complexity, small team size, or tight timelines that cannot support operational overhead. Architecture trade-off analysis helps identify when a modular monolith provides better maintainability without the distributed system complexity of event-driven services.