Architecture Decision Records

One decision, its context, alternatives and consequences, kept immutable.

5Questions

7Flashcards

3Terms

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Drill this topic All of Architecture Decision-Making

Questions

5 to work through

intermediate Multiple choice

A 60-engineer platform organisation of nine teams is introducing decision records and leadership asks what a healthy annual volume looks like so they can tell whether the practice is working. Roughly how many records should they expect per year?

2 min answer
intermediate

A team writes decision records diligently and nobody reads them. What is wrong with the practice rather than the format?

2 min answer
intermediate

An interviewer asks you to pick an architectural decision your team made in the last year and write its decision record on the whiteboard, then hands you a fact partway through that would have changed the choice. What is being assessed, and how should you work through it?

3 min answer
intermediate

Review this decision log. It holds 140 records over four years in the repository. 31 are marked superseded and 9 of those name no successor. Two records state conflicting positions on the same message bus and both read "accepted". The template has a Consequences heading that is empty in 96 records. A new engineer asked what the current position on async messaging is and spent half a day finding out. What would you change, what would you remove, and what would you leave alone?

3 min answer
intermediate

Your team writes ADRs and nobody reads them. What is wrong with them?

2 min answer

Terminology

3 terms in this topic

practice

Decision Context Capture

Recording the situation, constraints and forces that made a decision reasonable, so that later readers can judge whether it still applies.

practice

Decision Granularity

How much a single decision record covers, chosen so a later change can replace exactly the part that has become wrong instead of invalidating a docum…

metric

Decision Half-Life

The observed time it takes for half a set of architecture decision records to be superseded, read as a diagnosis of how the records are written rathe…

Deliverables

1 artifact you would hand over

Governance Artifact

Architecture Decision Record

One page recording a single decision, its context, the options rejected and the consequences accepted — written when the decision is made, never after.

Architecture Decision-Making