Governance & Evolution

Responsibilities

• Maintain architecture integrity through standards and decision logs.
• Define change control and review mechanisms.
• Enable long-term evolution without breaking invariants.

Key interfaces

• Decision log (ADRs) and review checklists.
• Change management process (deprecation, compatibility, migrations).
• Ownership model and escalation paths.

Operational signals

These are the measurements that tell you whether this layer is healthy in production.

• Architecture review throughput and time-to-decision.
• Repeated incident classes indicating systemic gaps.
• Dependency and coupling trends over time.

Failure modes

• Unowned decisions leading to drift and inconsistency.
• Breaking changes without migration plans.
• Security and privacy regressions during rapid iteration.

Production readiness checklist

• Require architecture notes for high-impact changes.
• Maintain compatibility windows and migration guides.
• Continuously evaluate and retire obsolete patterns safely.