Critiquing a System Design

Know the Vocabulary

This lesson uses the terms below many times. Read them once now, and come back here when a later section needs one.

• Critique: A review of a finished design that finds its problems, ranks them, and proposes a fix for each one.
• Finding: One problem in the design. A complete finding states the problem, its consequence, and its fix.
• Severity: How much harm a finding can cause, and how hard that harm is to undo.
• Invariant: A rule that must hold on every request, with no exceptions. An example is "an employee never sees a page they may not open."