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Level 10 / Project 09 - Strategic Architecture Review

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Concept This project — Quiz Flashcards — —

Focus

  • Architecture fitness functions as executable constraints
  • System model with service dependencies
  • Health scoring with automated recommendations
  • Transitive dependency depth calculation

Why this project exists

Architecture erodes silently — each small shortcut seems harmless until the system becomes unmaintainable. Fitness functions make architectural constraints executable and measurable, so drift is detected in CI rather than discovered during a crisis. This project builds a review engine with pluggable checks.

Run (copy/paste)

cd <repo-root>/projects/level-10/09-strategic-architecture-review
python project.py
pytest -v

Expected terminal output

{
  "system": "ecommerce-platform",
  "health_score": 50.0,
  "status": "warning",
  "recommendations": [...]
}

Alter it (required)

  1. Add an APIStabilityCheck that fails when services have different API versions.
  2. Add a CircularDependencyCheck that detects cycles in the dependency graph.
  3. Weight recommendations by priority and show the top 3 in the summary.

Break it (required)

  1. Create a system with a service that has 10+ dependencies and observe the coupling check fail.
  2. Add a service with 15,000 LOC and watch the complexity check flag it.
  3. Create a deep dependency chain (A->B->C->D->E->F) and trigger the depth check.

Fix it (required)

  1. Add configurable thresholds per service (some services legitimately need more dependencies).
  2. Make DependencyDepthCheck detect and report cycles instead of infinite-looping.
  3. Test the cycle detection.

Explain it (teach-back)

  1. What is an architecture fitness function and why is it better than a document?
  2. How does the health score aggregate multiple checks into a single number?
  3. Why does the dependency depth check use recursive traversal with a visited set?
  4. How would you run these checks in CI to catch architectural drift automatically?

Mastery check

You can move on when you can: - write a new fitness function and register it in the engine, - interpret a health score and prioritize recommendations, - model a system with known architectural problems and verify the checks catch them, - explain the difference between coupling, cohesion, and complexity metrics.

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