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✅ System Design: Design Review Checklist

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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