Developed. Tested. Built. Deployed. Monitored. Changed.
Those six words end a sentence I wrote in 2020 about what a team should be thinking during the design phase: how this feature will be developed, tested, built, deployed, monitored and changed. I wrote it as a mindset. Reading it again, it looks more like the price of admission to a meeting.
Put eight people in a room for an hour and you have spent a working day. If the document they came to review does not say how the thing will be tested, or how anyone will know it broke at night, that day goes on drafting those answers aloud, on the fly, with nobody having had time to check them.
A design is ready for review when every phase after it has an answer on the page.
- The six questions a design should answer before anyone spends an hour on it.
- Why the reviewer's first act is to check the page and, if a line is blank, to say not yet.
- The phase my own 2020 list never asked about, and what the hour is left for.
I have written the same list from the other side of the table. In The Day I Realised I Was Not Ready it is what an architect owns: how a feature will be built, tested, deployed and operated, how it degrades, how it changes. That is the view from the author's chair. This essay is the view from the reviewer's, where the same list becomes a rule about when a meeting may start.
Ready Means Six Sentences
The rule fits on one line. A design is ready for review when every phase after it has an answer on the page. The answer can be a verdict (the build produces one artifact from a clean checkout, and here is the run) or a plan (rollback is untested, and the drill is booked for the week before release). It cannot be an adjective. I have run it as a gate before: in 2020, reviews did not start until the design covered my checklist. The standards I work to now ask the same of every project: each aspect, from testing and deployment to monitoring, covered by a verdict or a plan.
The idea has a well-known neighbour. Google's SRE book describes a production readiness review, a check of a service's reliability needs that an SRE team treats as a prerequisite for taking the service on (The Evolving SRE Engagement Model). The gate here asks the question earlier, of the design, and across every phase after it.
Six lines is a shorter door than the one I used in 2020, when all thirty-five items of the checklist stood in front of every review. The thirty-five would still be in the design document. The six are what a reviewer can hold in their head and check before everyone has sat down.
Not Yet, in Writing
I know what a refusal feels like from the other side. My first design document as an architect got fifteen minutes from my chief architect and did not survive them. He told me it was a description of code, then gave me six or seven questions I had not thought to ask. I have told that story in The Day I Realised I Was Not Ready and will not retell it here.
What I took from it is that the questions were the useful part, and that I received them in the room, the most expensive place to receive them. A gate hands over the same questions the day before. If a line is blank, the reviewer says not yet, in writing, with the list attached, and the meeting moves. The refusal is about the page. The author leaves with the questions and not with a verdict on themselves.
Wording matters, and it is a separate skill. Ego-Free, Blame-Free, Radically Collaborative covers how to put a hard challenge so that it lands on the design and not on the person. The gate helps by making the first challenge a rule, so nobody has to find the nerve for it.
What the Page Cannot Settle
Once the six answers are on the page, the hour has work that a page cannot do. It can go on the choices nobody can undo: Decide, Then Say No gives those the slow week and leaves the reversible ones to a quick call. It can start from the sentence I bring into a design review, tell me how you would break this, which is Design the Failure First. And it can test whose numbers survive the first hard question, the ground of Precision Is Not the Point.
The gate moves the writing out of the room. What stays in the room is the arguing, which is the one thing eight people are needed for. I have seen the same split at a larger scale: a list of more than a hundred criteria lived in a tracker with an owner on every line, and the weekly meeting was kept for the hard problems, as told in Opinions, Yes. Evidence, No..
The hour belongs to the question the page could not answer.
What My Own List Never Asks
I went back through all thirty-five items of that 2020 checklist for this essay. They ask about the machine: modules and boundaries, pipelines, error codes, capacity, testing plans, versions and upgrades. I could not find one that asks who wanted the thing, or how anyone would know they had received it. The six verbs have the same limit. All of them are in the past tense, and all of them describe the life of a system after somebody has decided to build it.
By my own rule the list is a phase short. The sentence has no verb for delivered: how will we know the person who asked got what they needed. And nothing on it looks upstream, at who asked in the first place. A design can answer all six and still be a well-operated answer to a question nobody asked. The gate catches the machine; it does not catch the reason. If I wrote the sentence again I would add both. Part VI keeps the two ends of the lifecycle as phases of their own, Analyze and Deliver.
Every phase after design inherits whatever design left blank. Part VI continues one phase at a time, and the next live stop is the Develop phase.