Getting started with architecture decision records
The gap between knowing this and actually doing it is where most teams lose ground. A short on-ramp to architecture decision records for teams who have not touched it before.
The right architecture for a team of three is the wrong one for a team of thirty, and vice versa. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.
The reason this keeps coming up
Record the decision, the alternatives, and why they were rejected. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.
Your first week
- Find out what is already in place
- The reasoning is what future teams actually need
- Change one thing and measure it
A short record beats a long document nobody opens. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.
What this looks like day to day
Architecture is the set of decisions that are expensive to reverse, which is the only reason they deserve the name. 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
The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.