Independent architecture-risk assessment
For engineering and program leaders responsible for complex, tightly coupled systems. ZOYA turns hidden architectural coupling into a defensible cost and schedule figure in three weeks, fixed scope — then hands you the decision and leaves.
Three weeks, fixed fee Runs without source access No implementation contract afterward
Specimen outputIllustrative — not a client result
$323k per year
Exposure band $262k–$363k · every assumption stated
The problem
You have been in that meeting. The status reports are not lying — they are measuring the wrong thing.
A green status is a claim about work inside one boundary. The stories closed, the tests pass, the interface was built to the spec as understood. Every team can be telling the truth and the program can still be late.
Because a large share of the cost lives between boundaries — in assumptions two teams read differently, in state nobody owns, in changes that drag in coordination they should never have needed. None of it appears as a variance on anyone's report, because nobody reports on the gaps between reporting units.
Code-quality tools measure defects inside modules, and they do it well. The expensive debt is architectural, and it is largely unmeasured.
Gartner projects that by 2027, 80% of technical debt will be architectural, and published the inaugural Magic Quadrant for Technical Debt Management Tools in May 2026.
Where the gap actually sits. Illustrative, from the published specimen.
Who this is for
VP Engineering, Chief Architect, CTO and Program Director, at organizations building complex, tightly coupled systems. If none of these describe you right now, this can wait.
01 · Budget justification
Planning or board review is four to eight weeks out. The refactoring spend has to earn its place against everything else on the list, and "the architecture is holding us back" is not a business case.
02 · Schedule recovery
Teams green, program red, and the same margin of slip every cycle. Before you sign a plan with more contingency in it, you need to know how much of the last two slips was structural.
03 · Inherited system
An acquisition, a vendor handover, a transition. Roadmap commitments are being made now, and nobody has established what the architecture risk actually is.
What you receive
Written to be argued with. It goes into a budget pack unedited, and it has to hold up in front of someone who attended none of the interviews.
Rather than describe it further — the complete specimen deliverable is published, no form gate.
How it works
Fixed scope agreed before the first day. Scope changes are re-quoted, never quietly absorbed — which is what keeps a fixed-fee engagement honest in both directions.
Week one
Boundary agreed, handling and retention agreed in writing before anything moves. Documentation classified, coupling map built from interfaces and change records.
Out · Evidence graph and coverage recordWeek two
Change effort attributed to modules. Your own low-coupling work becomes the control, which is what makes the multiplier defensible rather than borrowed from someone else's benchmark.
Out · Exposure band and sensitivityWeek three
Remediation ranked by return per engineering day. Executive and technical readouts, then a 90-day sequence and every assumption, so you can re-run the argument without us.
Out · Deliverable and 90-day planWhat we do
The catalog is short on purpose. Everything here is one measurement — what your architecture actually costs you — entered from wherever you happen to be standing.
Start here
We read the documents your program already produces, map where the architecture is fighting you, and hand you the number: what coupling costs you each year, in dollars and integration weeks — and which fixes pay for themselves. You keep the evidence, the assumptions and a 90-day plan. Most clients stop here. That is the design.
It also runs as a two-week Schedule Recovery Review when the program is already slipping, or a scoped Inherited-System Review after an acquisition or handover. Ask on the call.
Request a scoping callBeyond the assessment — three services, each with its own page.
Continuous · after the assessment
The assessment gives you the number once. Radar keeps it alive — re-measuring continuously, so you can see whether the money you spent actually moved it, and catch the drift before it becomes a slip.
Explore Architecture RadarFor certification-carrying programs
On a certified program, a traceability gap is not untidiness — it is rework at the worst possible moment. Scoring weighted to the regime you actually carry: DO-178C, AS9100, MIL-STD-882, ISO 26262 or IEC 62304.
Explore Regulated Programs1–2 weeks · fixed fee
Your senior engineers spend their most expensive hours reading documents, and a vendor wants to sell you AI for it. Get an independent answer on whether it would actually help — from someone with nothing to sell you afterward.
Explore Document TriageAlso available, quietly: architecture governance after an assessment, and systems-thinking advisory for leaders who want the reasoning transferred, not just the report. Both begin with the same scoping call — everything does.
Why this is different
ZOYA measures and monitors. It does not perform remediation, does not staff delivery teams, and never bids on the work it recommends.
That is a structural constraint rather than a slogan, and it is the reason the deliverable is able to recommend against funding something. An assessment written by a firm hoping to win the remediation contract carries an incentive it cannot fully escape, however honest the individuals are.
It also means keeping the tooling you already bought. Scanners are good at what they do, and their output is evidence ZOYA consumes rather than replaces.
Coexistence, not displacement. Nothing here asks you to remove a tool you already run.
Who does the work
Principal · ZOYA Solutions
Systems thinking is the throughline. A systems engineering career spent on programs where no single team could see the whole system, in aerospace and other complex-systems engineering organizations, mostly where integration was the constraint. Doctoral research turned that instinct into a measurable method for technical debt management — which is where the assessment comes from. ZOYA is systems thinking applied one decision at a time: architecture and cost exposure today, and now, the decision-making itself.
The classification step behind the assessment was validated against a panel of 35 practicing engineers, reporting Cohen's kappa 0.84 — agreement between the classifier and expert human raters — and F1 0.82 detection accuracy. Those figures describe the reliability of the classification step, not the accuracy of the cost model; the difference matters, and it is set out plainly in the methodology brief. The validation population was drawn from complex engineering programs, and how far it generalizes beyond that population is an open question the brief also addresses.
Every assessment is delivered personally. No associate team, no offshore pod, no partner who appears at the pitch and never again. Capacity is deliberately limited to a small number of assessments a year — worth knowing before you plan around one.
Read the published method Request the research LinkedIn profile
Inspect it before you commit
Technical buyers evaluate rigor, not confidence. Gating this material behind a form would signal the opposite of what it contains.
The first two are open — no form, no email address, no drip sequence. The specimen describes no real client; it is constructed so the format and the arithmetic can be judged before anything is commissioned.
Questions
If yours is not here, ask it directly — info@zoyasolutions.com.
No. The assessment runs from interface control documents, requirements, design review records, test reports and change history. Source access is helpful and is used where it is granted, but it is not required.
That matters more than it sounds. It means the assessment also works on systems that are not yet built — which is exactly the phase where architectural decisions are cheapest to change.
Keep it. Scanners are good at finding unhealthy code, and ZOYA consumes their output as evidence rather than replacing it.
They are not built to answer the different question a budget review asks: which structural problem is consuming the milestone, and what is the return on fixing it versus leaving it alone. Answering that needs change effort, a fully-loaded day rate, the integration critical path and a counterfactual — none of which a scanner has, and none of which it should be expected to have.
Three ways. It is delivered personally by the principal rather than by an associate team. The method is published in full, including its limits, so you can check the arithmetic instead of trusting a brand.
And ZOYA does not perform remediation — so there is no follow-on contract quietly shaping what the assessment recommends.
A fixed fee, quoted after a scoping conversation. The scope is fixed at the same time, and scope changes are re-quoted rather than absorbed.
There is no day-rate arrangement and no open-ended engagement. If the scoping conversation suggests the assessment would not pay for itself on your program, that is a reasonable outcome and it will be said plainly.
Scope, transfer method, retention period and destruction date are agreed in writing before any material moves. Handling constraints are confirmed at scoping rather than assumed, and destruction is confirmed in writing on the agreed date.
Client material is never retained for benchmarking, never used to train or tune any model, and never referenced in another engagement. Where transfer is impractical, the assessment can be scoped so material never leaves your environment. Programs carrying certification obligations are covered here.
You receive the deliverable and a 90-day sequence your own teams can execute. Nothing else is required, and nothing else will be proposed unless you ask.
Architecture Radar, the continuous monitoring subscription, is optional and always follows an assessment rather than replacing one — without a baseline it would have nothing to measure against.
Next step
Thirty minutes, no charge, no deck. We establish whether your situation is one the assessment actually helps with — and if it is not, you will be told so.
One reply, from Dr Zak Ouzzif, within one business day. No sequence, no newsletter, no follow-up from someone you have never spoken to.
You will get a reply within one business day. If it has not arrived, check your spam folder and then write directly to info@zoyasolutions.com.