Search the practice set
126 questions, 454 terms and 400 topics in 20 areas.
23 results for “Technical Constraints”
Technical Debt
The future cost incurred by choosing an expedient implementation now instead of the better one.
Technical Proposal
A written argument for a course of action, circulated for review before the work starts, structured so that disagreement surfaces early and cheaply.
Application Portfolio Management
Maintaining an inventory of every application with its owner, cost, business value and technical health, and using it to decide what to invest in, replace or retire.
Architectural Driver
The small subset of requirements and constraints that actually shape the structure of the system.
Constraint Thinking
Designing for the budget, timeline, skills, regulations and existing estate that actually exist, rather than for the ones a textbook assumes.
Delivery vs Maintainability
Choosing where to take deliberate shortcuts, based on which kinds of debt are cheap to repay and which compound.
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.
Solution Architecture
The design of a specific system that satisfies a specific business problem under a specific set of constraints.
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
Southwest cancelled about 16,700 flights in December 2022 when crew scheduling could not recover from a storm, after years of deferred modernisation. How do you make that argument before the failure rather than after?
The case, as publicly reported A severe winter storm caused widespread cancellations across US carriers. Most recovered within days; Southwest did not. Its crew
The team can ship in six weeks with an approach that will need rework, or five months with one that will not. How do you decide, and what do you do either way?
What the interviewer is testing Whether you can make a debt decision deliberately rather than by default, and whether you know which debts are cheap and which a
Technical Constraints
Existing estate, skills, licences and platforms as inputs rather than obstacles.
Organisational Constraints
Team structure, skills and budget cycles as architectural inputs.
Regulatory Constraints
Non-negotiable requirements that remove design options entirely.
Requirements to Constraints
Turning stated requirements into the constraints that actually bound a design.
Technical Debt
Deliberate, tracked and repaid — as distinct from mess.
Technical Leadership
Setting direction and carrying accountability without a team reporting to you.
Technical Proposals
A written argument circulated before the decision feels made.
Layered Architecture
The default shape, its clarity, and where a technical partition fails.
Relational Modelling
Normalisation, keys, constraints and the invariants a schema enforces.
Service Boundaries
Drawing lines along change patterns rather than technical layers.