Reversibility
One-way and two-way doors, and buying optionality deliberately.
4 to work through
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intermediate
A team must decide quickly under uncertainty. How should decisions be classified so that speed is applied where it is safe?
2 min answer -
intermediate
How should reversibility change how much analysis a decision receives, and how do you assess whether a decision is genuinely reversible?
2 min answer -
intermediate
You have limited time to deliberate. Which decisions on a new platform deserve it, and which should be made quickly?
1 min answer -
advanced
How should reversibility change the process applied to a decision, and which decisions are commonly misclassified?
2 min answer
3 terms in this topic
One-Way Door
A decision whose reversal is prohibitively expensive or impossible, which is where analytical effort belongs - as distinct from the reversible majori…
conceptOne-Way Door Decision
A decision that is very costly or impossible to reverse, warranting deliberation proportionate to that permanence.
conceptTwo-Way Door
A decision that can be undone cheaply, and which therefore warrants a fast decision by the people closest to the work rather than extensive analysis.
Neighbouring topics
Architecture Decision-Making
General material on making and recording architectural decisions.
Architecture Decision Records
One decision, its context, alternatives and consequences, kept immutable.
Build vs Buy
Differentiation, five-year TCO, and the exit cost of each option.
Monolith vs Microservices
A team-topology decision far more often than a technology one.
SQL vs NoSQL
Decided by access patterns and query flexibility, not by data volume.
Sync vs Async
Whether the caller's outcome depends on the callee's response.
Strong vs Eventual Consistency
A per-operation decision, resolved by what a stale read would cost.
Managed vs Self-Managed
Trading control and unit cost against operational attention.
Serverless vs Containers
Spiky and event-driven versus sustained throughput.
Single vs Multi-Region
Driven by RTO, RPO and residency rather than by ambition.
Centralised vs Distributed
Shared platform leverage against team autonomy.
Performance vs Cost
Buying latency, and knowing what the last millisecond is worth.
Reliability vs Complexity
Mechanisms that add availability and add failure modes.
Security vs Usability
Varying control by the value of the action rather than uniformly.
Delivery vs Maintainability
Fast in the cheap places, careful in the expensive ones.
Deciding Under Uncertainty
Bounding the downside and buying information cheaply.
Trade-off Analysis Methods
ATAM, scenarios, and naming the points where qualities conflict.
Technology Selection
Evaluating options against drivers rather than against enthusiasm.
Decision Practice
Thresholds, review, supersession and keeping the log alive.