6.2 — Communicating Architectural Decisions and Trade-offs

CCAR-P Domain 6 · Task 6.2

What You Need to Know

Complete Communication Has Seven Parts

1. The decision
2. Options genuinely considered (including the one the audience expected)
3. Criteria they were judged on
4. Evidence (Domain 4 measurements, not assertions)
5. What each option costs and exposes
6. A recommendation (declining to recommend is abdication)
7. What would change the recommendation (the revisit condition)

Translation Changes the Lead, Never the Facts

• Executives → business consequence and risk
• Engineers → mechanism and constraint
• Legal/compliance → obligation and residual risk
• Sponsor → cost, date, and what they are being asked to accept

Simplifying past the point of truth is not translation.

Say the Error Rate Out Loud

State the rate, the population, and the handling path for residual errors. A demo is a sample from the favourable tail — never a substitute for the measured rate.

Disagreement Pattern

Measure → frame → recommend → leave the decision where accountability sits. Owner’s authority covers cost vs quality and scope vs date. It does not cover a legal/regulatory/safety obligation — there, say so and bring in the owning function.

Exam Traps

• Implementing a decision you hold measured evidence against, without comment
• Building it your way quietly after the argument went the other way
• Taking the disagreement to the owner’s superior before the trade-off has been put to the owner
• Answering “how accurate will it be?” with a single confident number