chore: Review backend-fw repository for architectural alignment

[MehmetBegun]

Description
The backend-fw repository requires a comprehensive architectural review to identify technical debt and ensure alignment with organizational standards. This serves as a critical quality gate to maintain framework scalability and performance before proceeding with new feature development. This review is essential to mitigate long-term maintenance risks and enforce best practices across the codebase.

Ownership, Deadline & Effort
Team Owner: Backend

Individual Owner: @99802205450481

Deadline: 2026-01-15 24:00 (end of day)

Estimated Effort: 3 hours

Deliverables
Comprehensive Review Document: A minimum 1-page detailed report (PDF or Markdown) documenting the repository's health, architectural patterns, and specific areas for improvement.

Review Summary Comment: A high-level summary posted as a GitHub comment for quick stakeholder visibility.

Issue Backlog: A set of linked GitHub issues for any identified bugs, technical debt, or refactoring needs.

Formal Status Update: A clear Approval or Request for Changes on the repository’s current state.

Scope
In Scope:

Assessment of code structure, modularity, and design patterns.

Identification of outdated dependencies and security vulnerabilities.

Review of API consistency, naming conventions, and documentation.

Evaluation of test coverage, error handling, and logging patterns.

Compilation of a formal, minimum 1-page review document.

Out of Scope:

Active refactoring or code fixes (these must be logged as separate issues).

Front-end integration testing.

Performance benchmarking/load testing.

Acceptance Criteria
[ ] A comprehensive review document of at least one page is produced and shared.

[ ] Repository structure is verified against the organization’s standard backend architecture.

[ ] All critical security vulnerabilities and deprecated dependencies are documented.

[ ] Follow-up tasks are created as actionable GitHub issues with appropriate labels.

[ ] The review summary is published as a GitHub comment for immediate team visibility.

[ ] The entire task is completed within the allocated 3-hour window.

Domain-Specific Notes: Engineering
Dependencies: Scan for deprecated or vulnerable libraries in the dependency manifest (e.g., package.json).

APIs: Validate that REST/GraphQL endpoints adhere to internal naming conventions and return standard HTTP status codes.

Documentation: Verify that the README and inline comments provide sufficient context for new contributors.

Assumption: The reviewer has administrative or read-access to the backend-fw repository and internal architectural guidelines.

Validation / Review Requirements
Definition of Done: The 1-page review document is submitted, follow-up issues are logged, and the findings have been communicated to the lead architect.

Required Reviewers: Engineering Lead or Senior Backend Architect.

Additional Context
Related Repository: backend-fw

[MehmetBegun]

Backend Framework Architectural Review - Summary

Overall Assessment: backend-fw is a powerful Spring Boot-based framework offering comprehensive infrastructure capabilities. It provides rich features in areas like exception handling, security, persistence, messaging, observability, and time governance. However, a significant gap exists in "enforcement," as many core architectural patterns and framework designs can be bypassed by services. This leads to code duplication, behavioral inconsistencies, increased bug risks, and higher onboarding costs for new developers.

Key Strengths: Comprehensive exception handling, strong time governance (FwClock), rich foundation layer (BaseEntity, BaseRepository), query framework, robust security infrastructure (JWT), messaging infrastructure (Outbox), observability (metrics, logging), and governance capabilities. The presence of ArchUnit and Testcontainers indicates a commitment to quality and testing.

Key Weaknesses & Areas for Improvement:

• Critical Spring Boot Version Mismatch: The pom.xml specifies Spring Boot 4.0.1, which is not a recognized stable version. This is a critical finding requiring immediate verification and update to a stable 3.x release.
• Weak Enforcement: Many framework patterns (validation, pagination, soft delete, security annotations, FwClock usage) are optional and can be bypassed.
• Missing Capabilities: Gaps exist in API versioning, automated correlation ID propagation, consumer base classes, and secrets management.
• Lack of Architectural Rule Enforcement: Documented architectural rules are not enforced at build-time via ArchUnit tests, leading to architectural drift.
• Inconsistent Package Naming: The presence of both backendfw and backend_fw packages indicates a naming inconsistency.

Conclusion: The next evolution of the framework must shift focus from "convenience" to "ownership and enforcement." Build-time (via ArchUnit) and runtime enforcements must be added, bypass paths eliminated, and architectural contracts rigorously applied to ensure consistency and reduce technical debt.

Status: Request for Changes

Formal Status Update: Request for Changes

Rationale: The backend-fw project, while offering comprehensive infrastructure capabilities, currently lacks mechanisms to enforce the mandatory use of these capabilities by services. This deficiency leads to architectural drift, inconsistencies, code duplication, and increased maintenance costs. To enhance the framework's effectiveness and ensure its long-term sustainability, the critical improvements outlined in the detailed architectural review report must be addressed.

Report: BackendFw_ArchitecturalReview_Report.md