Design Method Design-Method Rubric

Apply this to every Capstones capstone. Score each row mid / senior / staff.

Dimension	Mid	Senior	Staff
Requirements	lists functional reqs when prompted	separates functional vs non-functional; names the dominant constraint	drives ambiguity; sets scope & success metric
Estimation	rough QPS/storage	peak factor, read:write, hot-set size	ties numbers to a build/buy/scale decision
High-level design	correct boxes & arrows	clean data flow; clear service boundaries	failure domains & blast radius considered
Component choice	reasonable, mostly justified	justifies each; knows the alternatives	picks the minimum that meets reqs (when not to scale)
Scaling	adds replicas/cache when asked	finds the real bottleneck first	sequences scaling moves; migration path
Consistency	aware of strong vs eventual	maps model to mechanism (consistency models)	reasons about partitions, ordering, dedup
Trade-offs	mentions one	quantifies several	owns them; states what's deferred & why
Operability	"add monitoring"	RED/USE, SLOs, alerts (availability)	error budgets, rollback, DR (multi-region DR)

Capstone checklist

• [ ] Requirements + the single dominant non-functional constraint stated.
• [ ] Estimates (estimation) justify each piece of machinery (no premature scaling, when not to scale).
• [ ] High-level diagram + the exact lab profiles used.
• [ ] Bottleneck identified and addressed with a named component.
• [ ] Consistency model named (consistency models) and its cost acknowledged.
• [ ] Trade-offs and deferred work explicit.
• [ ] A demo.sh boots the profile set and drives load + a failure.