Evolutionary architecture
Evolutionary architecture is the design approach that explicitly plans for architectural change over time, building in fitness functions, modular boundaries, and incremental migration paths so the architecture can evolve without big-bang rewrites. The alternative, 'final' architecture, typically ages badly and produces rewrite cycles.
The discipline's central claim is that change is the only architectural constant, so design for change should be a first-class concern. Evolutionary architecture has three components: fitness functions (encoded architectural rules that catch drift), modular boundaries (small, well-defined units that can be replaced individually), and incremental migration patterns (strangler fig, parallel run, feature flags). The pattern is most relevant for long-lived systems where the original assumptions will not hold for the system's lifetime. The trap is over-engineering for change that doesn't happen; the discipline is to design for the changes likely in the next 2-3 years, not every conceivable future.