Technology
How to Audit a Software Architecture
What a CEO or investor should expect from an architecture audit: boundaries, failure modes, and the cost of change.
By Muhammad Owais Talat, Technology Consultant & Fractional CTO · Published
You are not auditing fashion
Whether the stack is “modern” is a weak question. The useful questions are: how is the system split, how does data move, where are the single points of failure, and how expensive is a change that the business already wants.
What to inspect
Boundaries between services or modules, coupling to vendors, deployment path, observability, data stores, and the knowledge that lives in one engineer’s head. Security and performance are part of the same picture when they affect risk.
Output a CEO can use
A good audit ranks findings by business impact, not by engineer taste. It says what to fix this quarter, what to live with, and what would be required if you acquire, raise, or enter a regulated workflow.
Due diligence is the same muscle
Technical due diligence adds a clock and a transaction. The method is the same: evidence, severity, and a cost-of-change story. That is the work of a technology audit.
Related service: Technology audit