Buzzword Driven Architecture: A TDD-Inspired Design Exercise
Inspired by TDD's red-green cycle, this lightweight exercise has teams sketch architecture, score tradeoffs, and catch over-engineering before writing any code.
A Reddit user proposed a lightweight exercise called 'Buzzword Driven Architecture' to structure system-design discussions. Inspired by TDD's red-green cycle, a team first picks around ten architecture characteristics relevant to a service (performance, security, deployability, etc.—the 'buzzwords') and sketches a rough architecture, no code, until every buzzword is roughly addressed, reaching a 'Green Phase.'
Next, each buzzword and the overall complexity are scored subjectively on a 0-10 scale, similar to story points. The goal is to surface a 'yes, but...' outcome—e.g., the system is very secure but slow and complex—and to keep iterating until the team feels the complexity-to-buzzword ratio is acceptable and the tradeoffs are understood and 'livable.'
The author stresses this isn't meant to replace established methods like ATAM or ADRs, but to be a small, discussion-provoking tool that helps teams talk through architectural tradeoffs and spot over-engineering before implementation. As a workshop format, they suggest taking a simple problem like LeetCode's Simple Banking System and designing it as a production service for 30-60 minutes. For engineers, the value lies in making architectural decisions explicit, cheap, and shared early, using a common team vocabulary.