When Practice Architectures Fall Apart: A Field Guide
You walk into a team room—or open a Slack thread, same thing—and someone says, 'We need a standard process for code reviews.' Everyone nods. Someone volunteers to draft a doc. Two weeks later the doc exists, no one reads it, and reviews are still a mess. That doc is an unseen practice architecture . The team has a practice—code review—but the architecture that supports it (who reviews what, when, what kind of feedback matters) is invisible. And when it's invisible, it rots. This guide is about making it visible: naming the parts, spotting the rot, and knowing when to rebuild vs. walk away. Where Practice Architectures Show Up in Real Work Incident response: the IR playbook as architecture Every team I’ve worked with has an incident response playbook — even when they swear they don't.