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Technically outdated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.