system-audit

name	system-audit
description	Conduct comprehensive system architecture evaluation. Assess design quality, technical debt, operational readiness, scalability. Use when auditing existing systems.

System Audit

Conduct comprehensive evaluation of system architecture and identify improvement opportunities.

Context

You are auditing a system's architecture. Assess design quality, technical debt, operational readiness, scalability potential. Read code, infrastructure, metrics, team feedback.

Domain Context

Based on architecture assessment frameworks:

• Design Quality: Modularity, coupling, cohesion. Is architecture aligned with business domains? Easy to change?
• Operational Readiness: Monitoring, alerting, logging, runbooks. Can ops team run this effectively? What happens when it fails?
• Scalability: Can it handle 10x growth? What's the bottleneck? Vertical or horizontal scaling?
• Technical Debt: What's slowing teams down? What would refactoring improve?
• Security and Compliance: Data protection, access control, audit trails, regulatory alignment?

Instructions

1. Prepare Audit Checklist:

   • Architecture & Design (modularity, coupling, domain alignment)
   • Data (model, storage, flow, governance)
   • Scalability (bottlenecks, growth headroom)
   • Operations (monitoring, logging, alerting, runbooks)
   • Security & Compliance (data protection, access control, audit)
   • Team Productivity (deployment time, testing capability, cycle time)

2. Gather Information:

   • Read architecture documentation, design documents
   • Review code structure, dependencies
   • Check infrastructure-as-code, deployment pipelines
   • Interview team: "What's hard? What's slow? What worries you?"
   • Review metrics: latency, error rate, utilization, deployment frequency

3. Assess Each Area:

   • Score: Good (no action needed), Fair (monitor, improve over time), Poor (urgent)
   • Document evidence: "Monolith 500K lines, 30-min builds, hard to test"

4. Identify Patterns:

   • Common themes? Multiple "poor" scores suggest systemic issues.
   • Root causes: "Tight coupling causing hard deployments and scaling issues"

5. Recommend Improvements:

   • Prioritize by impact and effort
   • Quick wins (low effort, high impact): improve monitoring, document runbooks
   • Strategic initiatives (high effort, high impact): decompose monolith, refactor critical paths
   • Timeline: what's urgent vs 2-year plan?

6. Document and Present:

   • Written report with findings and recommendations
   • Present to leadership and team
   • Create roadmap for improvements
   • Follow up in 6 months to measure progress

Anti-Patterns

• Audit Without Action: Produce report, file it away. Result: wasted effort, team cynicism. Guard: Use audit to drive improvements; track follow-up.
• Oversimplified Scoring: Everything is "good" or "poor" with no nuance. Result: not actionable. Guard: Explain context; acknowledge tradeoffs; show path forward.
• Ignoring Team Input: Audit from outside perspective only. Result: miss what team actually struggles with. Guard: Interview team; their perspective is crucial.
• Unrealistic Recommendations: Suggest complete rewrite. Result: ignored, too ambitious. Guard: Suggest achievable improvements; prioritize by ROI.

Further Reading

• Software Architecture in Practice by Len Bass et al. — architecture evaluation methods
• Assessing Organizational Alignment — evaluating organizational health
• Technical Debt Management — evaluating debt and improvement priorities