Catalog
concept#Architecture#Software Engineering#Governance#Reliability

Architecture Principles

Guiding rules for decisions about system structure, interfaces and quality attributes that promote consistency, maintainability, and scalability.

Architectural principles are foundational guidelines that govern decisions about system structure, interfaces, and quality attributes.
Established
Medium

Classification

  • Medium
  • Organizational
  • Architectural
  • Advanced

Technical context

Architecture repository or wikiCI/CD toolchainGovernance review processes

Principles & goals

Clearly defined interfaces and boundariesLoose coupling, high cohesionEvolve via small, risk‑controlled changes
Discovery
Enterprise, Domain, Team

Use cases & scenarios

Compromises

  • Inconsistent interpretation leads to fragmentation
  • Wrong prioritization can create technical debt
  • Over-simplification neglects quality attributes
  • Formulate principles concise, clear and justified
  • Link to concrete policies and examples
  • Regular review and adjustment

I/O & resources

  • Business and product goals
  • Existing architecture and component overview
  • Stakeholder requirements and compliance mandates
  • Documented architectural principles
  • Guidelines and checklists for teams
  • Governance requirements for reviews

Description

Architectural principles are foundational guidelines that govern decisions about system structure, interfaces, and quality attributes. They promote consistency, maintainability, and scalability by defining prioritized rules and trade-offs. Their scope spans enterprise architecture policies to team-level design standards and supports architects and product teams in prioritizing and communicating technical decisions.

✔

  • Improved maintainability through consistent rules
  • Faster decisions thanks to reusable guidance
  • Better team communication through a shared vocabulary

✖

  • Principles are abstract and require translation into concrete policies
  • Excessive rigidity can limit innovation
  • Success depends on team acceptance and discipline

  • Mean Time to Change

    Time from proposing a change to safely delivering it.

  • Service coupling

    Degree of dependencies between modules or services.

  • Deployment frequency

    How often changes are deployed to production.

Microservice architecture with clear interfaces

Organization defined principles for API boundaries and versioning to ensure integration and service independence.

Cloud-first principle in a migration

Strategy where new modules prefer cloud-native services to simplify scalability and operations.

Data security principle as organizational standard

Company enforces principles on encryption and access control as mandatory for all teams.

1

Capture goals and existing systems

2

Derive and prioritize principles

3

Document, anchor and communicate

4

Establish governance and review processes

⚠️ Technical debt & bottlenecks

  • Accumulation of legacy coupling due to ignored principles
  • Unaddressed interface incompatibilities
  • Outdated policies preventing refactoring
Tight interfacesMonolithic dependenciesUnclear ownership
  • Principles left as documentation without application
  • Blind adherence without contextual assessment
  • Using principles to justify poor implementation
  • Over-generalization makes principles useless
  • Insufficient measurability of impacts
  • Lack of involvement of operational teams
Architecture and systems thinkingStakeholder communicationEvaluation of quality attributes
Scalability and performanceSecurity and complianceTime-to-market and agility
  • • Regulatory constraints
  • • Existing legacy systems
  • • Limited developer resources