Chapter 12
Give the Architecture a Report Card

School report cards are an important feedback loop for students, parents, and teachers. Instead of waiting until the end of the year to learn if you pass or fail a subject, a quarterly report card can tell you if you’re on track to get the grades you want and show you where you can improve before it’s too late. Taking the time to evaluate our architecture, like school report cards, can help us catch problems early so we can stay on track to deliver.

Instead of thinking of evaluations as taking away time from programming, think of them as a way to make the time we spend programming even more powerful. Evaluations can take as little as an hour, and we can even fold them into existing development processes without anyone being the wiser.

In this chapter, you’ll learn how to give the architecture a report card. The feedback from an evaluation can be used to educate the team, create buy-in for design decisions, reduce delivery risks, and improve the architecture.