Decision Practice
Thresholds, review, supersession and keeping the log alive.
3 to work through
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intermediate
A large organisation wants consistent architectural decision practice across many teams. What should be standardised and what should not?
2 min answer -
intermediate
You join a team with no decision records. Significant choices are made in chat and nobody can explain why the system is shaped as it is. How do you introduce ADRs without it becoming process overhead?
2 min answer -
advanced
Three years of architectural decisions live in a wiki, in chat threads and in two shared documents. The team agrees to move decision records into the repository beside the code without a 300-page backfill. Give the sequence, and name the point of no return.
3 min answer
3 terms in this topic
ADR Lifecycle
The states an architecture decision record moves through — proposed, accepted, superseded, deprecated — and the discipline that keeps the set trustworthy.
practiceArchitecture Decision Record Practice
The habits that make decision records useful six months later — writing at decision time, recording rejected options, and never editing history.
conceptDecision Debt
The accumulated set of choices a system embodies but nobody wrote down, which turns every later change into an archaeology exercise and makes safe mo…
Neighbouring topics
Architecture Decision-Making
General material on making and recording architectural decisions.
Architecture Decision Records
One decision, its context, alternatives and consequences, kept immutable.
Reversibility
One-way and two-way doors, and buying optionality deliberately.
Build vs Buy
Differentiation, five-year TCO, and the exit cost of each option.
Monolith vs Microservices
A team-topology decision far more often than a technology one.
SQL vs NoSQL
Decided by access patterns and query flexibility, not by data volume.
Sync vs Async
Whether the caller's outcome depends on the callee's response.
Strong vs Eventual Consistency
A per-operation decision, resolved by what a stale read would cost.
Managed vs Self-Managed
Trading control and unit cost against operational attention.
Serverless vs Containers
Spiky and event-driven versus sustained throughput.
Single vs Multi-Region
Driven by RTO, RPO and residency rather than by ambition.
Centralised vs Distributed
Shared platform leverage against team autonomy.
Performance vs Cost
Buying latency, and knowing what the last millisecond is worth.
Reliability vs Complexity
Mechanisms that add availability and add failure modes.
Security vs Usability
Varying control by the value of the action rather than uniformly.
Delivery vs Maintainability
Fast in the cheap places, careful in the expensive ones.
Deciding Under Uncertainty
Bounding the downside and buying information cheaply.
Trade-off Analysis Methods
ATAM, scenarios, and naming the points where qualities conflict.
Technology Selection
Evaluating options against drivers rather than against enthusiasm.