Search the practice set
126 questions, 454 terms and 400 topics in 20 areas.
23 results for “Requirements to Constraints”
Architectural Driver
The small subset of requirements and constraints that actually shape the structure of the system.
Compliance Framework
A published set of control requirements an organisation is assessed against, which turns security posture into evidence somebody else will check.
Constraint Thinking
Designing for the budget, timeline, skills, regulations and existing estate that actually exist, rather than for the ones a textbook assumes.
Foreign Key Constraint
A database-enforced rule that a referencing value must exist in the referenced table — referential integrity that no application bug can violate.
Non-Functional Requirement
A requirement about how well the system must behave rather than what it must do — latency, availability, throughput, security, cost.
OLTP vs OLAP
Two workload shapes with opposite requirements — many small indexed transactions versus few large scans and aggregations — which is why they belong in different stores.
Pragmatism
Preferring the simplest architecture that satisfies the requirements, and treating additional structure as a cost that must be justified.
Quality Attribute Scenario
A structured, testable statement of a non-functional requirement: source, stimulus, environment, artefact, response, response measure.
SQL vs NoSQL
A choice driven by access patterns, consistency requirements and query flexibility — not by data volume, which is the reason usually given.
Solution Architecture
The design of a specific system that satisfies a specific business problem under a specific set of constraints.
A team wants event sourcing for a new order service, citing audit requirements. What do you recommend?
The recommendation: probably an audit log, not event sourcing If the requirement is audit , event sourcing is a very expensive way to obtain it. An append only
A startup asks you to architect their product "to handle millions of users". They currently have none. What do you actually build?
What the interviewer is testing Whether you can identify the real constraint. The stated requirement is scale; the actual constraint is survival, and an archite
Instagram served 14 million users with three engineers on Django and Postgres. What does that tell you about how to choose an architecture for a new product?
What the interviewer is testing Whether you can identify the binding constraint. For most products it is not traffic. What Instagram actually did Their 2011 pos
Leadership asks for multi-region "for resilience". What do you establish before designing anything?
First: is multi region the right answer to the actual problem? Multi region defends against a region wide failure . Most outages are not that — they are bad dep
Requirements to Constraints
Turning stated requirements into the constraints that actually bound a design.
Regulatory Constraints
Non-negotiable requirements that remove design options entirely.
Organisational Constraints
Team structure, skills and budget cycles as architectural inputs.
Technical Constraints
Existing estate, skills, licences and platforms as inputs rather than obstacles.
Architectural Drivers
The small subset of requirements whose change would force the structure to change.
Handling Ambiguity
Making progress when the requirements are not yet knowable.
Pragmatism
The simplest architecture that meets the requirements usually wins.
Relational Modelling
Normalisation, keys, constraints and the invariants a schema enforces.