Successful Software Architecture Review: Step-by-Step Process

Tight deadlines and quick solutions result in code and structural problems that grow over time. Even expertly designed software can experience issues as it grows in size and complexity. Therefore, a regular software architecture review is necessary to keep the system functional, usable, and secure.

However, most review methods are needlessly complicated due to inconsistent assessment methods, poor documentation, and communication gaps. Oversights lead to rework and reassessments that burn through resources.

Our guide describes the core components of a software architecture review with examples. We’ll guide you through the process, describe key strategies and tools, and recommend how to avoid common problems. But, since clarity is essential, let’s first define the related terms. 

A software architecture review is an analysis of an IT system’s components, design decisions, codebase, documentation, and technical strategies. This assessment highlights the design’s strengths and weaknesses, unnecessary dependencies and applications, potential security gaps, and outdated or low-quality code segments.

Software architecture reviews are divided into roadmap and design reviews.

• An architecture roadmap review helps determine if a project, update, or major tech stack change should proceed (considering readiness, risks, and potential benefits). 
• An architecture design review focuses on optimizing the current architectural approach.

The software architecture review process includes interviews, codebase testing, and documentation research.

All IT systems and products develop technical complexities and operational issues over time. A structured architectural design review can help in several ways:

• Reduced risk of technical debt. Technical debt arises when simple solutions lead to code issues and scalability problems. Timely reviews can identify suboptimal components, allowing you to replace or refactor them before they further degrade performance.
• Minimized resource wastage. Roadmap reviews help determine whether a project aligns with organizational priorities and the technical stack, enabling you to avoid initiatives that lack strategic value.
• Alignment with business goals. Reviews verify whether current design choices and scaling capabilities align with business objectives and meet defined security, usability, and performance requirements.
• Improved team collaboration. Code audits and stakeholder feedback reduce misunderstandings and highlight any need for additional tools to enhance collaboration.
• Enhanced developer experience. Poorly designed workflows and overly complex databases can slow developers and complicate onboarding. Architecture reviews identify these issues and eliminate unnecessary friction.
• Consistency in standards. Reviews ensure uniformity in organizational policies, coding standards, API designs, and other practices, simplifying development and maintenance.
• Regulatory compliance. Regular reviews ensure adherence to data privacy laws and regional regulations, helping to maintain IT security and avoid penalties for non-compliance.

In essence, architecture reviews help businesses address technical challenges and keep the system scalable.

• Business goals and metrics

  Your team should go into the review with a complete understanding of organizational priorities, business goals, domain requirements, and user needs. This involves identifying outcomes, critical information, constraints, and a list of acceptable alternative tech solutions.

• Stakeholder input

  A review should involve diverse viewpoints from the right stakeholders. Engage your product managers, architects, engineers, testers, and business users—each role can help uncover hidden issues and produce well-rounded recommendations.​

  A fintech company must consult security officers to evaluate how the architecture handles sensitive transaction data for a design review. Similarly, you can involve DevOps leads to validate whether the infrastructure aligns with your goals.
  ​

• Documentation and artifacts

  The review should be based on comprehensive documentation with up-to-date architecture diagrams, artifacts, code snapshots, deployment processes, and performance logs. These items should be continuously updated throughout the assessment to reduce misunderstandings during the current and future reviews.

• Key performance metrics

  Metrics help evaluate the software architecture before and after optimization. Define clear, quantifiable objectives, such as response times, system reliability targets, throughput, cost per transaction, and others. Also, find ways to gauge developer and user satisfaction.

• Risk analysis and mitigation

  All systems have risks of technical debt, system failures, breaches, future incompatibility, and other breakdown points. Identify potential weak points before and during the review as a basis for your optimization.

• Consolidated recommendations

  Organize your findings into actionable recommendations that suggest improvements and address root causes. The document should outline specific steps that prioritize tasks based on their system impact. Recommendations often lead to phased rollouts, such as introducing new tools, refactoring code, or restructuring system components.

• Continuous learning and retrospection

  Your software is continuously updated with technology implementations, code updates, and changing requirements. The team should conduct systematic software architecture reviews and schedule follow-ups to ensure sustainability.

It helps to document the lessons learned during the review to find ways to improve the process.

The review should dissect aspects of the system’s design, with each step building on the previous one.

To make the information more accessible, we have divided the guide into three stages: preparation, assessment, and results (follow-up). Each step contains outlines of the general direction and a software architecture review checklist with key considerations and actionable steps.

Stage 1: Preparation

1. Define the goals and scope

Without a clear understanding of the business’s goals, the review can become directionless and overly long. To maximize relevance and impact, all stakeholders should agree on the objectives and boundaries of the review. For a large assessment or high-impact decisions, invite representatives from all affected departments.

These are the key questions you should be able to answer before starting the review:

• What are the key problems customers face with the current architecture?
• Is the current architecture state represented in the documentation and diagrams?
• Does your policy contain an established set of coding standards?
• What are the success indicators, and how do they reflect current business needs?
• What is the scope of the review (the entire architecture or a single module or application)?

Once the goals are defined, you should translate them into measurable architectural characteristics.

2. Map goals to architectural characteristics

Determine the architectural attributes that influence the success of your business goals and review objectives. Every project has its own unique needs, but these are generally the most common attributes:

• Scalability: How well can the system handle increased load?
• Performance: What are the speed, throughput, and response times under normal or peak conditions?
• Reliability: How often does the system experience unexpected failures?
• Availability: How accessible is the system over a given period?
• Security: What safeguards protect databases and operations from unauthorized access and attacks?
• Compliance: Does the architecture support key industry regulations (GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, etc.)?
• Maintainability: How easily can the system be updated or adapted for new requirements?
• Extensibility: How straightforward is it to add features or integrate third-party components?
• Portability: Does the system run well on different operating systems, hardware environments, and cloud providers?
• Observability: Does the system log all internal operations, anomalies, and bottlenecks?

Goals should be aligned with these attributes to make the review focused. To handle more users, you would prioritize the scalability attribute. Similarly, you should focus on security testing if you need data privacy compliance.

3. Create documentation and metrics

Establish quantifiable indicators for the architectural attributes to assess the architecture. For performance, it could be page-load times or costs per request, maintainability might be represented by metrics like mean time to repair (MTTR), and reliability may be represented by mean time before failure (MTBF).

Then, draft or update the Review Packet that contains all relevant data for the review.

Update documentation about the software architecture, goals, and requirements. In addition to the key indicators described above, these documents can include architecture diagrams (visual representations of components, their interactions, and data flows), code snapshots (the current state of the code and related artifacts), and operational costs.

Preparing the documentation ahead of time allows reviewers to prepare for the assessment itself.

Stage 2: Assessment

4. In-depth system review

Scrutinize the codebase, run test scenarios, and analyze architectural techniques. The aim is to understand how each component operates, verify design decisions, and uncover issues. The review’s core aspects can include the following:

• Code quality: Use of meaningful variable names and logical structuring, linting and formatting, lack of duplicate code or processes, and proper documentation.
• Response times: Load and stress testing results, caching strategies, memory utilization, and bottlenecks with APIs or database queries.
• Operational stability: Error logs for recurring exceptions, single points of failure in code, fallback mechanisms, and error-handling routines.
• Reliability: System uptime, load balancers and clusters, backup and failover components, and manual processes that delay incident response.
• Interoperability: Data exchange format standards, API documentation accuracy, logging tools for third-party services, proprietary protocols, and locked-in services.
• Developer workflow: Efficiency of the coding, testing, and deployment processes.

Teams should methodically examine each area to isolate issues and prioritize fixes.

5. Risk and mitigation brainstorming

Risk-storming focuses on finding weaknesses or areas prone to failure under stress. Participants brainstorm potential failure points, analyze their severity, and propose ways to eliminate them.

For instance, a large part of the checkout process may depend on a single database. Or an authentication process could rely entirely on a third-party service. Even if the codebase and security mechanisms don’t detect issues, a risk-storming session should flag these as vulnerabilities.

6. Cost and resource analysis

Software designs often require balancing multiple priorities, such as speed, security, and maintainability.

Techniques like the Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method (ATAM) help assess how well an architecture addresses key quality attributes. For example, a streaming platform might reveal that caching at edge locations boosts speeds but increases deployment complexity.

This stage helps businesses and tech leads uncover issues that might not appear during regular assessments.

Stage 3: Results and follow-up

7. Consolidate findings

The review team must present all findings in the assessment report. Instead of running multiple separate demos, you can combine proposed changes into one Proof of Concept (PoC) that demonstrates the practical outcomes of the suggested revisions.

Prioritize high-value pilots in the report. Not every recommendation from an architecture review needs its own trial. Emphasize the ones with the greatest impact or the highest chance of failure.

Communicate how well the integrated PoC meets the original objectives. Show before-and-after comparisons of performance benchmarks, current and projected costs, and user satisfaction scores (which require a set of interviews and tests).

8. Define the next steps

After evaluating the software architecture review and assessment report, devise an optimization strategy that lays out concrete milestones for recommended changes, timelines, and resource requirements. These might involve training to cover skill gaps or downtime to migrate traffic to new systems.

At the same time, the review might leave some open questions. Keep track of any unresolved items for future revisions. For example, you might want to negotiate pricing or resource demands with the cloud provider or plan a security audit.

To streamline the entire process, organizations rely on specialized tools and practices to investigate their system design.

Architecture reviews rely on automation tools and collaborative methods to gauge performance, uncover design flaws, record findings, and plan solutions.

• The Software Architecture Analysis Method (SAAM) analyzes how much effort and resources are needed to modify a system. A healthcare startup can use the SAAM to see if telemedicine features require refactoring for looser coupling.
• Active Reviews for Intermediate Designs (ARID) involve testing scenarios for new or updated design modifications. Gaps, inefficiencies, or misaligned decisions are marked for revision before large-scale optimization.
• The C4 model technique illustrates the system’s relationships through four diagram layers: context, container, component, and code. This process prompts teams to decompose and examine dependencies, data flows, and weaknesses at each layer.
• An architecture review board is an internal governance group that unifies review standards, regularly examines the review process, and evaluates architectural design proposals.
• Version-controlled architecture decision records (ADRs) are structured documents that log key decisions from design or development. They are stored in a system that tracks and manages record changes by multiple stakeholders.
• Automated code analysis and monitoring tools inspect code for errors, track error rates and resource usage, and present metrics in clear dashboards. Commonly used options include SonarQube and New Relic.
• Performance and load testing tools help detect design problems by simulating system behavior based on its architectural model. Collaborative tools include Apache JMeter, Gatling, and Simulink.
• Visualization software creates charts or diagrams of relationships among system components. Enterprise Architect and Visual Paradigm suit large teams, while draw.io and Mermaid.js are ideal for smaller projects.

These practices and review methods aid the process, but mistakes can still creep in if you’re unprepared.

Even diligent teams can run into issues. Awareness of the following problems helps you maintain clarity and consistency during design or roadmap reviews.

• Lack of clarity. Vague or overloaded architectural documents cause misunderstandings and repetitive reviews. Ensure the documentation has a logical structure, clear goals, consistent terminology, and relevant diagrams.
• Outdated documentation. Many organizations fail to refresh documents often enough. Regularly update architecture references when new modules or integrations are added, as well as after each broad review.
• Narrow review focus. You mustn’t ignore business rationale and employee feedback during a review. Include all stakeholders for a broader view and rank business objectives to prioritize architectural decisions.
• Vague metrics. Poorly defined metrics make it difficult to measure software health or evaluate optimization outcomes. Set a clear list of metrics and evaluation criteria before beginning your assessment.
• Ignoring long-term impact. Without follow-up reviews, systems remain stuck in assumptions that no longer apply. Schedule periodic reassessments to update design decisions based on new requirements or performance data.

A structured architecture review leads to stable and efficient software. It helps avoid recurring issues, lessens technical debt, reduces security and compliance risks, and boosts operational performance.

You can also save resources without halting your team’s work by hiring a qualified partner. DevCom can manage your review from start to finish.

We thoroughly examine your software with an independent team, assess its structural design, and ensure compliance with best practices and core code standards. After that, our developers can maintain scheduled reviews at your chosen interval.

Want to learn more about our services? Feel free to contact us directly.