architecture-reviewer_skill

Overview

This skill reviews software architecture for SOLID principles, design patterns, scalability, and maintainability. It identifies violations, risky dependencies, and opportunities to apply proven patterns. It produces prioritized findings and actionable recommendations for refactoring or redesign. Use it to evaluate existing systems or plan architecture changes.

How this skill works

Provide an architecture diagram, code snippets, or a description of modules, services, and data flows. The skill inspects adherence to SOLID principles, layer separation, dependency management, and pattern usage, and assesses scalability, database design, and microservice boundaries. It flags issues like circular dependencies, SRP violations, and improper abstractions, then suggests concrete fixes and architectural options. Output includes severity-tagged findings, rationale, and recommended next steps.

When to use it

• Assess an existing system before a major refactor or rewrite
• Validate a proposed design or architecture diagram before implementation
• Identify maintainability and testability problems in legacy code
• Plan microservice boundaries, communication patterns, or scaling strategy
• Prepare architecture critiques for design reviews or technical leadership

Best practices

• Include architecture diagrams and representative code snippets for accurate analysis
• Describe nonfunctional requirements (scalability, latency, consistency) up front
• Collect dependency graphs and module boundaries to detect cycles
• Prioritize fixes by impact and effort: high-severity issues first
• Use suggested patterns (e.g., event-driven, CQRS) only where they address specific constraints

Example use cases

• Review a monolith to identify candidates for service extraction and responsibilities to split
• Audit a microservice ecosystem for circular dependencies and communication anti-patterns
• Evaluate domain model and repository layering for SOLID compliance
• Recommend database partitioning, indexing, or caching to improve read performance
• Propose an incremental migration plan to event-driven or CQRS architectures