Decisions
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Developing software involves making lots of decisions. Documenting these decisions and their outcomes achieves several important goals:
Knowledge Preservation: Architectural decisions capture the rationale behind important choices made during the design and development process. They serve as a reference point for future developers, allowing them to understand the thinking and context behind the architecture. Without proper documentation, critical knowledge can be lost over time as team members change or move on to other projects.
Communication and Collaboration: Documentation helps facilitate communication among team members and stakeholders. It allows the product owner, developers, and other stakeholders to share a common understanding of the software's architecture, its components, and the reasoning behind specific decisions.
Decision Transparency: ADRs provide greater insight into the choices made throughout the project. It helps team members and stakeholders understand the factors considered, alternatives evaluated, and the trade-offs involved in the decision-making process. This transparency fosters trust, enables better collaboration, and allows for informed discussions and feedback.
Risk Management: Documenting key decisions also allows project stakeholders to assess the potential impact of architectural changes, identify dependencies, and evaluate the consequences of modifying specific components. By having a clear understanding of the trade-offs associated with each option, teams can make more informed decisions and mitigate potential risks associated with changes or enhancements.
Improved Maintainability and Adaptability: Software projects evolve over time due to changing requirements, new features, or technological advancements. Documentation ensures that future developers can understand the architecture's design principles, patterns, and constraints. It enables future maintainers to modify or extend the codebase in a consistent and coherent manner, reducing the risk of introducing unintended side effects or architectural drift.
Onboarding and Knowledge Transfer: When new team members join a project, ADRs serve as a valuable resource for onboarding. They provide insights into the design choices, patterns, and best practices employed in the codebase. Documentation reduces the ramp-up time for new team members and helps them become productive more quickly.
Almost all of engineering and code development involves making choices, so how do you know when a particular choices rises to the level of an architecture decision and requires an ADR?
An Architectural Decision (AD) is a software design choice that addresses a functional or non-functional requirement that is architecturally significant.
Source:
Another way to recognize when making a decision related to your project constitutes an architecture decision is to ask yourself three questions about that decision:
Does this decision affect the structure, direction, or outcome of the project?
Would someone unfamiliar with the project ask me to explain why I made this decision?
Were there other viable alternatives I could have chosen?
If you answer "Yes" to at least one of these questions, then you've likely just made an architectural decision, and you should create an ADR to explain why you made that choice. Other contributors (and your future self) will thank you for it.
While architecture decisions come in all shapes and sizes, some common examples include:
Setting up the repository's main file structure
Selecting a critical library, tool, or platform
Adopting a certain analytical framework or algorithm
Choosing not to build a particular feature
When an architectural decision needs to be recorded, please use the following steps:
Identify the approvers for this decision, i.e. individuals or groups who must sign off on the decision before the ADR can be merged (ideally this happens before work starts on the ADR)
Draft an ADR in a branch named after the ticket, then open a Pull Request (PR)
The ADR should use the status "Active"
Invite the approvers to review the PR and provide feedback or approve the decision
Once the approvers have signed off on the decision, merge the PR into the main branch
Create any follow-up tickets that are needed to implement the decision outlined in the ADR (if necessary)
Use the {YYYY-MM-DD}-{description}.md naming convention and copy the into the directory (name the file with the date it was created, which may differ from the date the decision was made, PR was merged, or file was last modified)
If this decision deprecates an ADR, update its status to indicate the reason (e.g. "Superseded By [xxx](yyyymmdd-xxx.md)"), and move it to the directory