✅ System Design: Design Review Checklist

⚡ Quick Dive

Overview & Key Takeaways

A design review checklist ensures that your system design is comprehensive, robust, and aligned with business goals. It’s a tool for team alignment, quality assurance, and future maintainability.

📌 When to Use This Checklist

  • Before implementing a new service or system
  • During architecture reviews or RFCs
  • As part of design documentation

🧠 1. Requirements

  • [ ] Are functional requirements clear?
  • [ ] Are non-functional requirements (latency, scale,

📖 Extended Guide

A design review checklist ensures that your system design is comprehensive, robust, and aligned with business goals. It’s a tool for team alignment, quality assurance, and future maintainability.

📌 When to Use This Checklist

  • Before implementing a new service or system
  • During architecture reviews or RFCs
  • As part of design documentation

🧠 1. Requirements

  • [ ] Are functional requirements clear?
  • [ ] Are non-functional requirements (latency, scale, uptime, etc.) identified?
  • [ ] Are SLAs/SLOs defined and realistic?

📐 2. High-Level Architecture

  • [ ] Are major components/services well defined?
  • [ ] Are responsibilities of each component clear?
  • [ ] Are boundaries and data flow between components documented?

🗃️ 3. Data Modeling

  • [ ] Is the data model aligned with the domain?
  • [ ] Are trade-offs (e.g., normalization vs denormalization) addressed?
  • [ ] Is schema evolution considered?

📊 4. Scalability

  • [ ] Can the system scale horizontally if needed?
  • [ ] Are there any single points of failure?
  • [ ] Are resource bottlenecks identified and mitigated?

♻️ 5. Reliability & Resilience

  • [ ] Are failure modes and retries addressed?
  • [ ] Is circuit breaking / backoff / fallback in place?
  • [ ] Are timeouts configured reasonably?

🔐 6. Security

  • [ ] Is authentication handled securely?
  • [ ] Is authorization enforced consistently?
  • [ ] Are secrets and sensitive data managed safely?
  • [ ] Is traffic encrypted (TLS)?

🚦 7. Observability

  • [ ] Are logs, metrics, and traces defined and implemented?
  • [ ] Are alerts configured for failure scenarios?
  • [ ] Can issues be debugged quickly in production?

🔁 8. Maintainability

  • [ ] Is the design modular and testable?
  • [ ] Are key decisions well documented?
  • [ ] Are naming conventions and patterns consistent?
  • [ ] Are there areas of overengineering?

🧪 9. Testing Strategy

  • [ ] Are unit, integration, and load tests planned?
  • [ ] Are edge cases and failure modes covered?
  • [ ] Is chaos testing or fault injection considered?

🚀 10. Deployment & CI/CD

  • [ ] Is deployment safe and automated (CI/CD)?
  • [ ] Is rollback or canary deployment possible?
  • [ ] Is configuration externalized?

🔄 11. Cost & Operations

  • [ ] Is the cost of compute, storage, and traffic considered?
  • [ ] Are cloud resources scalable and optimized?
  • [ ] Is operational effort sustainable?

🧭 12. Trade-Offs and Alternatives

  • [ ] Are design decisions justified with trade-offs?
  • [ ] Are rejected alternatives documented?

✅ Final Step

  • [ ] Did the team review the design together?
  • [ ] Are open questions or risks documented?
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