Inverse Conway Maneuver
If organizations copy their communication structure into their designs, change the structure on purpose. The term’s source, three design checks, and its misuse.
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Breaking Change
A change can break the supported contract or expose an unsupported assumption. Check both, including changes that silently alter results.
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Conway’s Law
Communication paths influence service boundaries. Examine actual decisions and handoffs rather than inferring ownership or design quality from team counts.
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Modular Monolith
A modular monolith makes interfaces and data ownership explicit within one deployment. These boundaries reduce the work of service extraction.
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Cloud Native
The definition names loose coupling and five operational qualities. Containers and microservices appear in it as examples, and explicitly as a partial list.
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Cloud Native and Service Boundaries
Service decomposition can leave dependencies intact. Examine ownership, contracts, and shared failures before choosing a distributed topology.
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ATAM (Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method)
ATAM evaluates an architecture by turning quality goals into concrete scenarios and finding the decisions they hinge on: risks, sensitivity and tradeoff points.
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C4 Model
The C4 model describes software at four zoom levels and keeps deployment separate, so structure and where it runs stay two distinct questions.
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4+1 Architectural View Model
Kruchten’s 4+1 model describes a system through four views plus scenarios, keeping structure, concurrency, modules, and deployment as separate concerns.