System Design Cheat Sheet

Image 1. Monument Valley Game

You can use it for interviews or assessments, pre-sales, or estimations.

1. Understand Problem and Scope

• Recognize stakeholders and prioritize them. Create a RACI matrix
• Understand business drivers of the project
• Recognize end-users of the project and understand how they use that system
• Check functional requirements
• Define external dependencies
• Suggest additional features
• Remove items that interviewer considers out of scope

2. Think about constraints and non-functional requirements

• (use PASS ME if you do not remember all of NFRs)
• Recognize the number of users
• Estimate users growth rate (for the next year/next five years)
• Define average response time
• Understand database size (current / for the next year/ for the next five years)
• Understand storage size (current / for the next year/ for the next five years)
• Recognize security needs
• Define acceptable downtime of the system
• Recognize the number of requests (per…