"Shift Left" - A Signature Paper from the knowis CTO

The Silent Productivity Killer🥊
Over more than a decade of technological progress, we’ve mastered automation in build, deployment, and operations – CI/CD, GitOps, Platform Engineering.
But one phase of software development remains under-prioritized and underfunded: the pre-code phase.

As a Principal Architect at knowis, I frequently see crucial architectural and design decisions made too late, left unclear, or never documented at all – with serious consequences for productivity and quality.

The key question is: how can we systematically avoid this – without overburdening our teams?

⚠️ The Root Cause?
Debt incurred during the architecture/design phase is the precursor to technical debt – strategic, invisible, and extremely costly.

This kind of debt arises when architectural or design decisions:

• are made too late or without team alignment

• exist only on whiteboards or in people’s heads

• aren’t documented, traceable, or discoverable.

Our experience shows: up to 50% of rework stems from lack of precision, alignment, and documentation in the design phase.

❓ Why Is This So Risky?
Problems emerge when:

• Architectural decisions are implicit and not coordinated

• Tools are lacking to share or version architectural knowledge

• New team members need too long to understand “the architecture”

• There’s no structured space for early discussion and feedback

The result: Systems scale poorly, become hard to maintain, and expensive to change.

“I don’t believe architecture should be documented by a few – it should be understood and shared by all.”

📄 Why Traditional Documentation Falls Short
Architecture and architectural decisions are often not documented at all.
Even when tools are used, they tend to be:

• Technically outdated

• Not collaborative

• Too rigid and slow

• Misaligned with modern development workflows

🔄 A Modern Alternative: Treat Architecture Like Code

“You’ve automated the build – now upgrade your thinking.”

What works for deployment can also work earlier in the software lifecycle:

• Treat architecture like code: version-controlled, machine-readable, searchable

• Shift Left: bring visibility to architecture and design early

• Collaborative and accessible: across team boundaries

• Validatable: with AI-powered consistency checks and recommendations

🛠️ How Modern Teams Work
With the knowis Cloud Solution Workbench, teams practice modern architecture:

• Architecture becomes part of the development flow

• Decisions are documented and traceable

• New colleagues get up to speed faster

• Platform and feature teams think in the same space

• Design shifts from bottleneck to accelerator

“My goal is for architecture to not feel like a ‘should’ – but to serve as an accelerator for product development.”

✅ Conclusion & Recommendation
Making architectural intent explicit and executable boosts not only quality – but also team velocity, onboarding, and maintainability.

Don’t just invest in automation after the code. Invest in clarity before the first commit.