[jeffbee]

I've seen mixed things from architecture reviews. I've seen it used by people with titles that exceeded their actual abilities, to stop people with junior titles from doing things the senior person simply didn't understand. And I've seen architecture reviews used just to satisfy the whims of senior people, to gratify that urge to nitpick or dictate what language they wanted to use. Those are the bad ways.

The good way I've seen architecture review used is nobody was going to tell you not to write or even deploy whatever the hell it was that you thought you wanted to write, but if you wanted to integrate with Grown Up Systems, there were ACLs that your system would not be added to unless and until your system had passed the review of the Grown Ups. I think this way is strictly better for two reasons: it can't strangle good ideas at birth, and it minimizes the amount of architecture reviewing that everyone needs to do, because half of the junk that gets brought to pre-implementation arch reviews never gets built anyway.