Core service
Measure where your architecture breaks
Before rewriting a system, you need to know where the problem actually is. An Architecture Assessment measures it and turns it into an order of work you can act on.
- Duration
- 2 to 3 weeks
- Model
- Fixed price, fixed scope
- Output
- Findings report and 12-month roadmap
If three of these sound familiar, it is time for an assessment
These are not separate bugs. They are different faces of the same structural problem, and a cluster of three means the architecture no longer carries the growth.
- A small change takes weeks to reach production, and release day is planned like an incident.
- The cloud bill grows faster than usage, and nobody can explain it line by line.
- You moved to microservices, but delivery slowed down instead of speeding up.
- When an incident happens, finding the cause takes hours; there is no measured MTTR.
- A new engineer’s first meaningful contribution comes weeks after joining.
- Two teams solve the same problem with two different patterns, and nobody can say which is right.
- A rewrite is on the table, but nobody can put a cost and a duration on it that they would defend.
Measure first, then intervene
Most architectural problems are misdiagnosed. A slow system rarely comes from the wrong database; it usually comes from the wrong boundaries. An expensive cloud bill rarely comes from too many resources; it usually comes from a scaling policy that behaves badly. Skip the diagnosis and the intervention lands in the wrong place.
That is why an assessment is not a list of recommendations but a piece of measurement. It reads the codebase, infrastructure, delivery pipeline and runtime data together, ranks findings by business impact and puts an estimated remediation cost next to each one.
What you get is a document you can defend in front of your technical board. It tells you not only what to do, but in which order and why.
Scope
Included
- Codebase and dependency analysis
- Runtime and infrastructure review
- Delivery pipeline and release management review
- Data layer and consistency model
- Observability maturity and incident history
- Cloud cost breakdown
- Alignment between team structure and architectural boundaries
- Prioritised 12-month roadmap
Not included
- Writing code or implementation; that is a separate engagement
- Penetration testing and formal security audit
- Legal and regulatory compliance opinion
- Product strategy and market analysis
- Staff evaluation or performance review
What happens, week by week
- Week 0Preparation. NDA, read-only access, existing documentation and the last six months of incident records are gathered. The access list fits on one page.
- Week 1Discovery and reading. Codebase, infrastructure definitions and delivery pipeline are reviewed. Interviews with your team reveal the gap between how the system looks on paper and how it actually runs.
- Week 2Measurement and analysis. Latency, deployment frequency, failure rate and cost data are collected. Findings are ranked by business impact and remediation cost.
- Week 3Report and presentation. The findings report is delivered and walked through with your technical team in a 90-minute session. Every question raised is added to the report.
Exactly what you receive
All outputs are yours. Including the source files, they are your property from day one.
Who this service is not for
- Teams that have not yet shipped their first release. Without a system there is nothing to assess; we suggest a design session instead.
- Projects where the decision is already made and only sign-off is wanted. Our job is to question the decision, not to approve it.
- Organisations expecting a report in under two weeks. A superficial assessment does more harm than none.
- Organisations looking only for a document to attach to a bid.
Frequently asked questions
Do we need to give you production access?
No. The whole engagement runs on read-only access: code repositories, infrastructure definitions, observability dashboards and incident records. Write access is never requested.
Do you sign an NDA?
Yes, before the first technical conversation. We can send our standard template, or use yours.
Who owns the source code and documents?
You do. The report, diagrams and measurement data, everything we produce, is your property from day one.
Do you also implement the recommendations?
Both options are possible. Many clients take the report and implement it with their own team; some involve us in the first stages. The assessment carries no commitment to implementation, and that is deliberate.
We are a small team. Is this service for us?
If you have fewer than fifteen engineers, we usually suggest a focused one-week review instead of a full assessment. We do not sell more than you need.
How much of our team’s time does it take?
Roughly six to eight hours in total: one-hour interviews with three to five people, plus a closing session. The rest happens on our side.
Why is there no team page?
Because we work inside our clients’ production systems and codebases, we do not publish our team details. The CVs and certifications of the architects assigned to your project are shared directly once an NDA is signed.
Start with a short technical call
Thirty minutes. You describe the system, and we tell you what an assessment would uncover in your case. Scope and price are settled after that call.