Software architecture consulting
Review and design of systems for scale, cost, security and future change.
- Engagement
- Fixed-fee review, monthly design review optional
- Typical timeline
- 3–4 weeks
- Starts with
- Read access to the repository and your last three incident write-ups.
Your engineers are about to make three decisions that will be expensive to reverse: how the data is shaped, where the boundaries between services fall, and what the queue is really for. Everyone in the room is capable. None of them has done it at the size you are heading towards.
Decisions today that do not become next year's rewrite.
What we build
Concrete artefacts, handed over and documented.
- 01
A review of the current system with findings ranked by severity and by what each will cost if left alone
- 02
C4 diagrams of the system as it is and as it should become, drawn so a non-engineer can follow them
- 03
Architecture decision records for every significant choice, including the options rejected and the reason
- 04
A sequence for getting from one to the other in steps that each leave the product working
- 05
A short set of checks your team can run to tell whether the architecture is still holding
What changes
The irreversible decisions get made deliberately and written down where the next engineer can read them
Your team inherits the reasoning rather than only the conclusion, so the following decision is theirs
A rewrite is usually avoided, because the sequence turns it into a series of survivable changes
How it runs
01Read everything
The code, the incident write-ups, the slow queries, and an hour with each engineer separately.
02Design
Target architecture and decision records, with the trade-offs written where the team can disagree with them in the margin.
03Walkthrough
A working session with your engineers, then one revision after their objections, which are correct on at least one point most of the time.
Chosen per project. Named here so you can see the shape of it.
- Structurizr
- C4 diagrams
- GitHub
- Notion
Questions we get asked
Related work
Tell us the outcome, not the tooling.
Send us the situation you are in. We will tell you which discipline it belongs to, what we would do first and what it costs, including when the answer is to wait.