Before you invest in architecture decision records

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. Before you spend anything on architecture decision records, it is worth confirming a few things are already true.

Architecture is the set of decisions that are expensive to reverse, which is the only reason they deserve the name. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

Prerequisites

• You can describe the outcome you want in one sentence
• Someone owns it after the work is done
• Record the decision, the alternatives, and why they were rejected
• You have a way to tell whether it worked

Warning signs

The reasoning is what future teams actually need. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

A short record beats a long document nobody opens. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

The short version

The right architecture for a team of three is the wrong one for a team of thirty, and vice versa. Three things worth confirming about architecture decision records before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• A short record beats a long document nobody opens — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.