Search the practice set

term

Architecture Trade-off Analysis Method

A structured evaluation that scores an architecture against prioritised quality-attribute scenarios and identifies the points where those attributes conflict.

Architecture Decision-Making term

Non-Functional Requirement

A requirement about how well the system must behave rather than what it must do — latency, availability, throughput, security, cost.

Architecture Fundamentals term

Quality Attribute Scenario

A structured, testable statement of a non-functional requirement: source, stimulus, environment, artefact, response, response measure.

Architecture Fundamentals term

Application Performance Monitoring

Instrumentation inside the application that attributes latency and errors to specific code paths, queries and dependencies.

Observability term

Brownout

Deliberately reducing the quality or completeness of every response under load, rather than serving some requests fully and rejecting others.

Load Shedding term

Data Catalog

A searchable inventory of datasets with their schema, owner, meaning, freshness, quality and classification.

Data Governance term

Data Contract

An explicit, versioned, enforced agreement between a data producer and its consumers about schema, semantics, quality and change policy.

Data Governance term

Delivery vs Maintainability

Choosing where to take deliberate shortcuts, based on which kinds of debt are cheap to repay and which compound.

Architecture Decision-Making term

LLM Evaluation

A repeatable measurement of whether an AI system's outputs are good enough, on cases that reflect the actual task.

AI-Era Architecture term

Slowly Changing Dimension

A strategy for handling attributes that change over time, deciding whether history is preserved and how facts attach to the correct version.

Data Warehousing term

Test Pyramid

A distribution of tests weighted towards many fast unit tests, fewer integration tests, and very few slow end-to-end tests.

Software Architecture term

Time to Market

How long it takes to get a capability in front of customers — often the constraint that dominates every other architectural quality.

Business Architecture

quiz

A client wants an assistant that answers questions from 50,000 internal documents which change weekly. RAG or fine-tuning? What actually determines the quality?

What the interviewer is testing Whether you understand what each technique actually does, and whether you know that RAG quality is a retrieval problem. Why RAG

AI-Era Architecture

topic

Quality Attributes

Availability, latency, throughput, security, cost — expressed as testable scenarios.

Architecture Fundamentals — no content yet topic

Chunking & Retrieval

Structure-aware splitting, hybrid search and why chunking dominates quality.

AI-Era Architecture — no content yet topic

Data Governance

Ownership, lineage, quality, catalogues and who may see what.

7 items topic

Functional vs Non-Functional

Behaviour versus quality of behaviour, and why only the second constrains structure.

Architecture Fundamentals — no content yet